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| A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
Who were the first Irish to land on the American continent and the time of their arrival are perhaps matters of conjecture rather than of historical proof; but that the Irish were there almost at the beginning of the colonial era is a fact support by historical records. The various nations of Europe whose explorers had followed Columbus were alive to the possibilities of land conquest in the new continent. For this purpose colonists were needed, and expeditions were fitted out under government protection, which brought over the earliest settlers. England was especially active in promoting these expeditions, and during the seventeenth century, various colonies, beginning with that of Jamestown in 1607, were planted with immigrants, most of them of English nationality. Irish names, however, are met with occasionally in the documents relating to these settlements; it is certain that there were Irish Catholics in the Virginia Colony prior to 1633. In the narrative of the voyage of the Jesuit Father Andrew White and his associates in the "Dove and "Ark" from England to Maryland in 1633 in Lord Baltimore's expedition, we are told that on the way over they put in at Monserrat (one of the smallest of the Caribbean Islands) where they found a colony of Irishmen "who had been banished from Virginia on account of professing the Catholic Faith" (see Old Catholic Maryland, p. 14). The accepted history of that island attests the fact that it was originally settled by Irish, although at present the white population has largely disappeared. A modern traveller (Stark, 1893) says: "It is not surprising therefore that the descendants of the slaves who belonged to the Irish settlers all have Irish names, and speak a jargon of Irish, English, and African in which the brogue predominates. While Father White and most of his companions who first planted the cross in Maryland were of English origin, it is equally true that Ireland, as well as other Catholic lands in Europe contributed their quota of missionaries who nourished the Faith in the early Maryland settlement, and among the Jesuit missionaries of these times we find Fathers Carroll, Murphy, Hayes, Quinn, O'Reilly, Casey, and others whose names indicate their Celtic origin.
But the beginnings of immigration from Ireland to America, in such numbers and under such circumstances so notable as to become a matter of definite historical record, may be said to date from the subjugation of Ireland by Cromwell in 1651. Under that merciless conqueror the English policy of transplanting the Irish was ruthlessly carried out. The native Irish were deprived of their lands, routed from their homes, and ordered to remove their families and such effects as were permitted to the Province of Connaught in the west, where a certain territory, mostly wild and desolate, had been prescribed, within which they were to remain under military surveillance and establish a new residence. Those who refused suffered various punishments and sometimes death. In many cases the complaisant commissioners appointed by Cromwell ordered the deportation of the recalcitrant Irish to the American plantations, and enterprising merchants from Bristol and London carried on a lucrative business in shipping and transferring these unfortunate victims to their destination. In order to sustain their traffic, leave was granted to fill their ships which such destitute or homeless inhabitants (made such by their conquerors) as might be delivered to them by the military governor for transportation abroad, so that, as the records show, during the years 1651 to 1654, 6400 young exiles (mostly young men and women) were carried away and delivered, some to Barbados, and some to the different English colonies in America. Two thousand more boys and girls were shipped the following year to Barbados and to the American plantations, and it has been estimated that in the year 1660 there were 10,000 Irish who had been distributed thus among the different English colonies in America (see American Catholic Quarterly Review, IX, 37). Of the total number thus shipped out of Ireland across the main, the estimates vary between 60,000 and 100,000 [Lingard, "History of England", X (Dolman ed., 1849), 366].
Prior to this deportation there had been some voluntary emigration from Ireland to America; with the development of the colonies this emigration increased and later assumed such enormous proportions that, before attempting to trace its progress, it may be useful to inquire what were the causes which compelled over five million people, pouring out in a continuous stream for nearly two centuries, to abandon their native land, with all its associations, religious, domestic, and national, and seek homes for themselves and their families beyond the Western Ocean.
For over a hundred years before the Cromwellian era Ireland had been distracted by the frequent invasions of the English under desperate and unscrupulous leaders, whose professed purpose was to re-establish English supremacy in Ireland, and to force the new religion of Henry VIII upon her clergy and laity. The old religion which the nation as a whole had cherished for over a thousand years was proscribed, and her churches, monasteries, and other shrines of religion plundered. The lands attached to them were confiscated by the Crown, and parcelled out among the greedy adventurers, whose success in despoiling the true owners of their property meant their own enrichment. The adherents of the old Faith, comprising as they did much more than five-sixths of the population, were made outlaws, their homes destroyed, their estates forfeited and their liberties and life itself were the price they had to pay for their refusal to conform to the new religion. In aid of the policy of exterminating the Catholic Irish (of which no concealment was made) a system of penal laws was put into force, under which they were disfranchised, disqualified from acquiring or holding property, compelled to remain illiterate, fined, imprisoned, and many of them tortured with every refinement of cruelty. Their bishops and priests were classed as felons, a price set on their heads, and an incredible number of both clergy and people who adhered loyally to the religion of their forefathers were either put to the sword or hanged, drawn, and quartered. So cruel and atrocious was this code that Edmund Burke described it as "a truly barbarous system; where all the parts are an outrage on the laws of humanity and the laws of nature; it is a system of elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, imprisonment and degradation of a people, and the debasement of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man". "The law", says another writer, "did not suppose the existence of an Irish Roman Catholic, nor could they even breathe without the contrivance of government" (Lecky, Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, I, 246).
Concurrently with the enforcement of these laws various schemes were projected by the English adventurers, some as early as the reign of Elizabeth (1573), for the colonization of Ireland chiefly with English and Scottish settlers. For instance, in 1709, in pursuance of the policy of stamping out the Irish and replacing them with a more tractable race, 820 families of German Palatines, comprising 3073 persons, landed at Dublin at a cost to the government of £34,000 (Young, I, 371). Military expeditions were organized and sent over to take possession of the lands of the disaffected Irish. Great tracts of land, sometimes embracing whole counties, were declared confiscated to the Crown and were allotted to the "gentlemen undertakers" who financed these enterprises. Under James I 5,000,000 acres, and under Charles I about 2,500,000 acres were thus confiscated. The native Irish chiefs and their clansmen naturally resisted these attempts to dispossess them of their lands. If they remained passive some provocation was invented for goading them into rebellion. In either case, they were adjudged to be rebels who might lawfully be hunted and shot down on sight. The methods adopted to crush them were cruel in the extreme, their cattle were taken from them, their houses levelled, and their harvests burned. Men, women, and children were indiscriminately shot down and even hanged by a brutal soldiery, and the remnant which escaped found shelter in the neighbouring bogs and mountains where they were hunted to death as outlaws or perished from starvation.
In other parts of Ireland, where these methods of transplantation or extermination had not yet been attempted and where the inhabitants had escaped the horrors of this guerrilla warfare, there were hundreds of thousands of fertile acres. These were then and had been for over three hundred years in the undisputed possession of their owners, the native Irish, and were held under the tribal system of tenure. As a pretext for dispossessing these lawful proprietors from their lands and making them available for plantation, a Royal Commission, appointed for the purpose, declared the titles defective, and over half a million acres of land not heretofore confiscated were adjudged to have reverted to the Crown. In consequence the true owners, against which no disaffection could be alleged, were forced either to retire, or were permitted to remain practically as tenants, upon onerous conditions, on a small portion of their former holdings, the balance being reserved in part to the Crown, and in part being distributed among the adventurers who had advanced money for carrying out the scheme, and the soldiers as a reward for services rendered. The reformers, or "discoverers" as they were called, who attacked these titles before the Commission, were likewise rewarded by grants of portions of the plundered lands. Speaking of these various changes in the ownership of the land, Arthur Young, an impartial Protestant observer, writing in 1776 (Tour of Ireland, Vol. II, p. 59), says: "Nineteen-twentieths of the kingdom (comprising 11,420, 682 Irish acres or nearly 21,000,000 acres, English measure) changed hand from Catholic to Protestant. . . . So entire an overthrow of landed possessions is, within the period, to be found scare within any country in the world. In such great revolutions of property the ruined proprietors had usually been extirpated or banished." While the enforcement of these laws and such methods of conquest bore heaviest on Roman Catholics, yet the Presbyterian Irish, chiefly in the north, and the Quakers were likewise made to suffer for their attachment to their country and to the religion which their consciences dictated, so that no element of the native population escaped the savage vengeance of their English conquerors. The periods of respite were few, and the calm was only the peacefulness of death and desolation.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the population of Ireland, as a result of this barbarous treatment, had been reduced to about one and a half million souls. Lest the survivors, in whom the native instinct of industry and enterprise still prevailed, should draw any measure of prosperity to themselves and away from England, the legislation for Ireland was steadily directed toward the restraint, if not the absolute ruin, of all her trade and commerce. Embargoes were laid on the exportation from Ireland of cattle, meat, and other food products, and the exportation of wool and woolen goods to any other country than England (which manufactured a supply sufficient for home consumption) was forbidden under heavy penalties so that in 1699 as many as 40,000 weavers were denied of the means of livelihood and many of them the forced to emigrate. Such trading as was not positively forbidden had to be carried out only in English built ships, to the ruin, of course, of the seaboard towns and the shipbuilding industries of Ireland, and in 1696 all import trade direct to Ireland, whether from foreign countries, or from the English colonies was prohibited; even the linen industry, then slowly growing, was checked by heavy duties imported on its sailcloth and other manufactures exported to England, where alone they were allowed to find a market. With the success of the American patriots and the re-establishment of the Irish Parliament in 1782, some prospect of improvement appeared, only to be dispelled by the Act of Union of 1800. Their legislative independence thus extinguished, their trade and commerce destroyed, with every avenue for honourable occupation closed against them, the Irish people were thrown back on the soil for their means of support and became victims of a system of landlordism with its rents, fines, and rack-rents, its tithes and other iniquitous conditions under which human beings could not live except by almost super-human industry and self-denial.
These, briefly stated, were the conditions which confronted the Irish yet remaining on their native soil at the close of the eighteenth century. That those who could should go elsewhere to find relief was most natural. As a result, a tide of emigration set in, to be continued during two centuries, carrying away millions of the people who were destined to become so important an element in the establishment and maintenance of the American Republic. It was no ordinary overflow of a surplus population, seeking new fields of industry, nor the enterprise of adventurous spirits induced, as had been other colonists, by the promise of rich rewards, but rather the mournful flight of a people seeking to escape the ruin which had overtaken so many of their fellow-countrymen, and which as surely was to be their lot if they remained at home. During the period of 1680 to 1720 thousands of woolen weavers, mostly Protestants from Ulster, deprived of their means of livelihood, and dissenters as well as Roman Catholics anxious to avoid persecution, had left Ireland for the American Colonies, where they "were changed into enemies who paid off old scores in the war of American Independence" (Gregg, "Irish History", 92). Other Catholic Irish from the middle and south of Ireland had likewise voluntarily emigrated to the different colonies, through which they dispersed, to find or make homes for themselves and their families where circumstances favoured.
In the early years of the eighteenth century we find abundant records of Irish emigration. Thus, in 1718, five ships arrived in Boston with 200 emigrants from Ulster. So considerable was the influx that, in 1720, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed an ordinance directing that "certain families recently arrived from Ireland be warned to move off", and, in 1723, another ordinance was passed requiring all Irish emigrants to be registered. During the years 1736-1738 ten ships arrived at Boston harbour bearing 1000 such immigrants, and hardly a year passed without a fresh infusion of Irish blood into the existing population. Irish names frequently appeared in the early records of many of the New England towns, showing how widely the immigration had distributed itself, and in some cases those emigrating from particular localities in Ireland were numerous enough to establish their own independent settlements, to which they gave the names of their Irish home places, such as the towns of Belfast, Limerick, and Londonderry in Maine, Dublin, Derryfield, and Kilkenny in New Hampshire, and Sullivan and Carroll Counties in the latter state, and this practice was followed in many instances by the Irish arriving in other colonies, notably Pennsylvania and New York, where the names of counties and towns of Ireland attest to the place of origin of the first settlers. It was from Irish settlers in New Hampshire that Stark's Rangers were recruited who fought the battle of Bennington and took part in the campaign leading to the surrender of Burgoyne. The official military records of the province of New York show that from early times Irishmen were there in large numbers. Thomas Dongan, the first colonial governor (appointed in 1683), who gave New York its first charter of liberties, was a native of the County Kildare and a Catholic. The muster-rolls of the various military companies which were maintained under British rule down to the time of the Revolution and participated in the French and Indian Wars show a large proportion of unmistakable Irish names, and there were some thousands of Irish soldiers in the various regiments of the line and of the militia of New York serving in the Continental Army.
On account of its reputation for religious tolerance and wise administration, William Penn's colony attracted Irish settlers in unusual numbers. Penn's trusted agent and administrator of the affairs of the colony during the period 1701-1751, James Logan, distinguished for his high character and the ability with which he discharged his trust, was a native of Lurgan, Ireland; among the "first purchasers" who embarked with Penn on the "Welcome", arriving with Penn in 1682, we find the names of several Irishmen, who with their families had left their native towns of Wexford and Cashel respectively for America. (See list in Scharff and Westcott, "History of Philadelphia", I, 99.) Other early Irish immigrants arriving at Philadelphia were, Patrick, Michael, and Philip Kearney, natives of Cork, among whose descendants may be named General Stephan W. Kearney, first governor of California, Commodore Lawrence Kearney, and the dashing General Phil Kearney, the distinguished soldier of the Civil War, and, in 1719, George Taylor, later one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In 1727, 1155 Irish landed at Philadelphia and in 1728, 5600 more. Holmes's "American Annals" states that out of a total of 6310 immigrants, arriving during 1729 by way of the Delaware River, 5655 were Irish. In one week alone, as reported by the "American Weekly Mercury" of 14 August, 1729, there arrived "about two thousand Irish, and an abundance more daily expected". In 1737 thirty-three vessels are registered as arriving at Philadelphia bringing passengers from different ports in Ireland, and although definite statistics are not available, there is sufficient evidence to show that this tide of emigration did not slacken for many years. So great was it that in 1735 a bill was introduced in Parliament to prohibit emigration from Ireland entirely. The great number of Irish in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the War of Independence, their high character, and important standing in that community indicate how large and valuable had been the immigration there.
Besides the Irish who had come into Virginia Colony before referred to, there was other emigration to it, as well as to the Carolinas, while as early as 1734 a colony of 500 Irish settlers planted themselves on the Santee River; among these are to be found such names as Rutledge, Jackson, and Calhoun, which a generation later were to be famous in the history of the United States. Other settlements in the United States were made by Irish immigrants who had come thither from the northern Colonies. From various town and other colonial records (see Hanna, "Scotch-Irish", II, 9 and passim), it has been ascertained that Irish emigrants had settled in Pennsylvania in 1682, in North Carolina in 1683, in South Carolina and New Jersey in 1700. The historian of South Carolina (Ramsay) writes, "but of all other countries none has furnished the Province with so many inhabitants as Ireland" (Vol 1., 20). The disastrous famine of 1740, like that still more terrible one a hundred years later, greatly increased the immigration to America; besides those who left from Galway, Dublin, and other ports it is recorded that for "several years afterwards 12,000 emigrants annually left Ulster for the American plantations", and that "from 1771 to 1773 the whole emigration from Ulster is estimated at 30,000 of whom 10,000 are weavers". (Lecky, "History of England in the Eighteenth Century", II, 261; Froude, "England in Ireland", II, 125.)
There are no official records of immigration to the United States prior to 1820. But with reference to the period from 1776 to 1820 the Bureau of Statistics has adopted an estimate, based on the most reliable data which could be obtained, showing 250,000 as the total immigrants of all nationalities arriving in the United States during that time. In his notebook for 1818, Bishop Connolly says, "At present there are here [New York] about 16,000 Catholics — mostly Irish; at least 10,000 Irish Catholics had arrived in New York only within these last three years. They spread", he adds, "over all the large states of this country and make their religion known everywhere." And beginning about this time, namely the close of the second war with England, 1812-1815, the stream of Irish emigration, which before had been largely Presbyterian, was changed, so that Catholic Irish have ever since constituted the bulk of such immigration into the United States. The number recorded as arriving from Ireland in the year 1820, the first year of the official registration of immigrants, is 3614, and judging from these figures and from the proportion of immigrants arriving prior to the War of Independence, we may safely say that, out of the above official estimate of 250,000 as the total number of immigrants during the period from 1776 to 1820, at least 100,000 were Irish.
Since the year 1820 the number of immigrants arriving in the United States from Ireland is shown by the official records as follows: —
1821-1830: 50,724
1831-1840: 207,381
1841-1850: 780,719
1851-1860: 914,119
1861-1870: 435,778
1871-1880: 436,871
1881-1890: 655,482
1891-1900: 403,496
Total: 3,884,570
and for the years 1901 to 1908 inclusive as follows: —
1901: 30,561
1902: 29,138
1903: 35,300
1904: 36,142
1905: 37,644
1906: 34,995
1907: 34,530
1908: 21,382
Total: 259,692
(See Reports of Com. General of Immigration for 1906-7-8 and "Immigration", p. 4338), the above figures indicating that emigration from Ireland during the past eight years has been maintained at nearly the same average as during the last preceding decade. As a result the population of Ireland has diminished according to the censuses from 1861 to 1901 at the following rate per cent: —
1861: 11.8 percent
1871: 6.7
1881: 4.4
1891: 9.1
1901: 5.2(See Statesman's Year-Book, 1907).
The greatest immigration in any one year was in 1851 when 221,253 persons are recorded as arriving; next to this was the year 1850 with the arrivals numbering 164,004. The arrivals during the decade 1841 to 1850 were nearly four times greater than those of the preceding ten years, and this number in turn was exceeded by the figures for the next succeeding decade 1851-1860, when the highest level in the history of Irish immigration to the United States was reached. The statistics given above show a total immigration from Ireland between 1820 and 1907 of 4,144,262 persons, to which add 100,000, the number as above estimated for the years 1776 to 1820, making a total of 4,244,262, exclusive of the Irish who were in the United States prior to the Revolution. But there are reasons for believing that the figures thus given underestimate the actual volume of Irish immigration. During the decade 1841-1850 Irish labourers went in large numbers every year to England in search of employment, and many of them remained, especially in Liverpool, the population of which became in time to a large extent Irish. In 1846 alone, 278,005 Irish of both sexes were reported to have left Ireland for Liverpool, whence most of them embarked for America (see British Commissioners' Report", cited in O'Rourke's "History of the Great Irish Famine", pp. 487-8).
Many such emigrants sailed directory to the United States and arrived in largest numbers at the port of New York. During the years 1847-70, the State of New York through its Emigration Commission maintained a system of registration of aliens arriving at that port, and the records thus kept show the total of Irish immigrants largely exceeding the number reported by the National Bureau of Statistics. These variations may be explained by remembering that under the New York system immigrants were classified according to the country of their nativity, while in the Federal reports for the most part classification is made according to the "country of last permanent residence" of the immigrant, so that those who had left Ireland and had sojourned for a while in England were not classified as Irish immigrants. Again during the same period there was a large immigration to Canada, some of it officially promoted and assisted by public money (O'Rourke, op. cit., p. 483). Much of it was destined for America, but was diverted to Canada by English shipowners, who found it easier to deliver their human freight there than at the port of New York, where the condition and circumstances of the immigrant were more carefully scrutinized.
The United States Bureau of Statistics estimates the total immigration into Canada between 1821 and 1890 at 3,000,000, of which it is safe to assume that more than half came from Ireland. No official record has been kept of immigrants arriving in the United States from Canada, except in certain cases neither numerous nor important enough to be mentioned here, and it is impossible to state the precise number of persons of Irish birth who, sooner or later after their arrival in Canada, crossed the borders and thus increased the Irish element in the United States. That the number was very large there is abundant evidence. In an official statement presented in 1890 to the Canadian House of Parliament, the opinion was expressed that over one-half of the immigrants arriving in Canada ultimately removed to the United States. (See Immigration into the U. S., in U. S. Bureau of Statistics, 1909, p. 4335.) And it has been argued that if the 3,000,000 immigrants arriving in Canada had had to remain there, the total population of the Dominion must have increased far beyond 5,371,315, the figures officially reported in 1901. These considerations, we think, justify a revision and correction of the estimate of Irish immigration into the United States (for the period 1820 to 1903), which up to the present time has been officially quoted at "about four million"; we would say that, taking the entire period from the War of Independence (1776) to and including 1908, such immigration easily numbers five and a half million souls.
Recurring to the statistics of recorded immigration, we find the number of persons of Irish nativity included in the resident population of the continental United States at the close of each decennial period since 1850 to be as follows: —
1850: 961,719
1860: 1,611,304
1870: 1,855,827
1880: 1,854,571
1890: 1,871,509
1900: 1,615,459[see Abstract of 12th (1900) census, p. 9].
And the same census (1900) shows that in that year there were 4,968,182 persons resident in the United States of whose parents at least one was born in Ireland, including the 1,615,459 residents above specified, who were themselves of Irish birth. Of these 67 per cent were located in the states of the North Atlantic division and twenty-two per cent in the North Central division. About three-fourths of the above foreign-born population shown by the census of 1900 were comprised in the following eight states with the respective numbers set opposite:
New York: 425,553
Massachusetts: 249,916
Pennsylvania: 205,909
Illinois: 114,563
New Jersey: 94,844
Connecticut: 70,994
Ohio: 56,918
California: 44,476
While the twelve cities having the largest population of Irish nativity were as follows:
New York: 275,102
Chicago, Illinois: 73,912
St. Louis, Missouri: 19,421
Providence, Rhode Island: 18,686
San Francisco, California: 15,963
Newark, New Jersey: 12,792
Philadelphia: 98,427
Boston, Massachusetts: 70,147
Jersey City, New Jersey: 19,314
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: 18,620
Cleveland, Ohio: 13,120
Lowell, Massachusetts: 12,147
Beyond the immediate ancestry of persons comprising the population, no classification according to race origin has been made in any census, and there is consequently no official record showing what part of the native-born population (excluding descendants of the first degree) is of Irish origin. But various unofficial estimates have been made. In 1851 Hon. W.E. Robinson, M.C., in a carefully prepared disclosure (reported in the "New York Tribune", 30 July, 1851) refuting the claim then urged by various public writers and speakers that the population of the United States was chiefly Anglo-Saxon in character, presented statistics of emigration showing that not more than one-eighth of the population could be considered as of Anglo-Saxon origin and that out of a population then (1850) numbering 23,191,876 there were: —
Irish born: 3,000,000
Irish by blood: 4,500,000
making a total Irish element of: 7,500,000
Rev. Stephen Byrne, O. S. D., author of "Irish Emigration to the United States", puts the Celtic element at one-half of the present (1873) population, the Anglo-Saxon at one-fourth. The official census of 1870 gives the total population of the United States as 38,696,984. And the New York "Irish World" (25 July, 1874), speaking of the census, claims that two-thirds of the people are Celts by birth or descent and only about one-ninth are Anglo-Saxon, and in a tabulated statement of the components of the population, that journal estimates the "joint product in 1870 of Irish Colonial element and subsequent Irish immigration (including that from Canada) at 14,325,000" (cited from O'Kaine Murray's "History of the Catholic Church in the United States", p. 611).
In 1882 Philip H. Baganel, an English writer, in his work "The American Irish", p. 33, states: "the American Irish themselves lay claim to a population of between ten and fifteen millions. There can be no doubt that the amount of Celtic blood in the American people is very much greater than they themselves would like to allow." Since 1870, 1,749,460 immigrants from Ireland have arrived, according to the above-quoted official statistics, apart from those arriving through Canada, and if the estimated Irish element of that year has doubled itself and no more, during the forty years which have now elapsed, the number of persons of Irish birth or origin in the continental United States would appear now to be not less than thirty millions. We have referred to the Irish immigration for 1851 as the largest in history. The steady and extraordinary increase from 44,821 in 1845 to 257,372 in 1851 (figures of Thom's Almanac for 1853, cited in O'Rourke, "History, etc.", p. 496) compels attention chiefly on account of the tragical causes from which it arose and the distressing conditions under which the immigrants of that period established themselves in the United States.
As is well known the potato blight appeared in Ireland in 1845, as it had appeared before, namely in 1740, 1821, and in several later years. By 1846 it extended over the whole country, so that nowhere in the land were there any potatoes fit either for food for human belongs or for seed. But side by side with the blackened potato fields there were abundant crops of grain which were in no way affected by the potato blight. These, however, were disposed of frequently by distraint, as the sole means of providing the rent for the landlord, while the unfortunate tenants by whose labour they had been produced were left without food. Famine which brought fever and other miseries in its train set in, so that tens of thousands of people sank into their graves, many of them dying within the shelter of the poorhouses. There were evictions without limit, many of them under heart-rending circumstances. Dr. Nulty, Bishop of Meath, tells of 700 human beings evicted in one day in 1847 from one estate (Parnell Movement, p. 114), and other appalling instances may be cited. In 1847 there were in the Irish workhouses 104,455 persons, of whom 9,000 were fever patients (O'Rourke, "History of the Great Irish Famine", p. 478). Nearly three-quarters of a million were employed on public works which had been devised as a means of relieving the distress, and 3,020,712 persons were receiving daily rations of food from the Government (ibid, 471).
Of the horrors of that time it is almost impossible to speak with moderation. "While myriads starved to death in Ireland" says O'Neill Daunt (Ireland and her Agitators, p. 231), "ships bursting with grain and laden with cattle were leaving every port for England. There would have been no need for the people to emigrate if their food did not emigrate. But the exhausting result of the Union had brought matters to a point that compelled Ireland to sell her food to supply the enormous money drain. The food is first taken away and then its price is taken away also." "The Union has stripped them" (the Irish people) "of their means and the only alternatives left to the perishing multitude were the work-house, emigration, or the grave." The condition to which the Irish people were thus reduced was extremely pitiable and excited the sympathy of the whole world. "The peoples of Europe sent alms, the Turks opened their hearts and hands, while ship after ship freighted generously from the American shores passed fleets of English vessels carrying away from a dying people the fruits of their own labour (see Lester, "Glory and Shame of England", I, 161). 114 ships carrying provisions, the result of charitable contributions for a starving nation, landed their cargoes in Ireland in 1847 (O'Rourke, "History, etc." p. 512), and the United States, responding to the universal sentiment of the nation, sent its to ships of war, the "Jamestown" and "Macedonian", on these errands of mercy. From these causes the population of Ireland was diminished during the famine period by two and a half million souls: they disappeared by death and emigration. It was to America that by far the greatest number of emigrants went.
The transportation of emigrants in those early days was attended with such cruel conditions that reviewing them now after a lapse of fifty years, it seems almost incredible that they should have been tolerated by any civilized nation. The ships employed in this service were only too often broken-down freight ships, in which merchants were unwilling to entrust valuable merchandise. The humane provisions of modern times with respect to light, ventilation, and cleanliness were wholly unknown. More often than not the ships were undermanned, so that in case of a storm the passengers were required to lend a hand in doing the work of sailors. The provisions supplied were always uncooked, scanty in amount, and frequently unfit for use. With favourable weather the voyage lasted from six to eight weeks. Against head-winds and storms the old hulks were frequently from twelve to fourteen weeks on the way. With the emigrants already predisposed by famine and hardship, it is not to be wondered at that fever often broke out on board ship and that many died and their remains were tossed overboard during the voyage. This was especially true in the British vessels, in which the death-rate exceeded that of the vessels of all other nationalities (see Kapp, "Immigration", p. 34).
As a result these emigrant ships when reaching the United States were in many instances little else than floating hospitals. When they arrived in port the shipmaster made haste to discharge his human cargo, and the sick and dying, as well as those who had survived unharmed, were put ashore on the wharves and the public landing-places and were left to their fate. Some of the sick, when they reached New York, were fortunate enough to gain admission to the Marine Hospital; others were carried to the sheds and structures which had been provided by the brokers and agents of the shipowners, under their agreement with the municipal authorities to provide for such sick emigrants as they might land. But the treatment of the emigrants in these institutions was little less brutal than they had experienced on shipboard. The food there was often unfit for any human being, still less for the sick. Sanitary conditions were ignored, and medical attendance was rarely adequate to the existing needs. Not only the sick and dying, but often the corpses of the dead, were huddled together. One instance is specified where the bodies of two who had died four to five days before were left unburied upon the cots whereon they had died, in the same room with their sick companions (see Maguire, "The Irish in America", p. 186). So fatal were these conditions that it has been estimated by medical statisticians that not less than 20,000 emigrants perished by ship fever and in the various emigrant hospitals in American ports in the year 1847 (Kapp, "Immigration", p. 23).
Those of the emigrants who survived the hardships of the voyage and retained strength enough to go about encountered troubles of a different kind. Boarding-house runners, ticker-sellers, and money-changers swarmed about the landing-places. Boarding-house charges were fraudulently multiplied, money-brokers practiced their calling at extortionate rates, while the selling of fraudulent railroad-tickets was one of the commonest practices by which the poor immigrant was plundered. As a result the able-bodied immigrant was compelled to remain in and around new York without means to help himself or his family, and this oftentimes became a charge upon the charity of the public. So gross did these abuses become that a number of the most prominent citizens of New York applied to the Legislature for relief. Included in these were Archbishop Hughes, Andrew Carrigan, John E. Devlin, Charles O'Connor, James T. Brady, John McKeon, Gregory Dillon, and other men of Irish blood who were identified with the Irish Emigrant Society, which had been organized for the purpose of aiding the Irish immigrants arriving at the port of New York.
The result of their exertion was the creation by Act of Legislature of the State of New York of the board generally known as the "Commissioners of Emigration", composed of men of the highest standing in the community, who served without compensation, and to whom was entrusted the general care and supervision of the immigrants as they arrived. Gulian C. Verplanck, distinguished alike as scholar and public-spirited citizen of New York, served during twenty-three years as president of this board, and although not of Irish blood, his long and faithful service in the behalf of the Irish immigrants ought not to pass without honourable mention in these pages. Under the watchful supervision thus established the evils complained of were gradually overcome, notwithstanding persistent opposition from shipowners and emigrant runners. In 1855 the first state emigration depot was opened in Castle Garden at the lower end of Manhattan Island, and since then millions of immigrants have streamed through this gateway, under the inspection and protection of the officials, on their way to the various places throughout the land where they were to make their homes. In 1874 the Congress of the United States assumed control of the question of immigration, and the admission and supervision of arriving immigrants are now in charge of a Commissioner of General Immigration appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury. In 1884 a Home and Mission House were established in close proximity to Castle Garden for the protection of Irish immigrant girls. This institution was founded by Cardinal John McCloskey, with the co-operation of other prelates, and was placed in charge of Rev. John J. Riordan, a zealous Irish priest who gave his life in its service. The beneficent work of the Home in sheltering unprotected women, and in promoting their moral and material welfare, is universally recognized.
Speaking of the distribution of the immigrants upon their arrival in the United States Bishop J. L. Spalding estimates (Mission of the Irish People, p. 113) that only eight in one hundred of the Irish emigrating to the United States have been employed in agricultural pursuits, a percentage smaller than that of the emigrants from any other country, the remaining ninety-two going to make up the tenement-house population in the larger cities. He asserts further (op. cit. p. 166) that the agricultural settlers became such more by accident than from choice, following the lines of the railroads or the canals on which they laboured, saving their wages and buying lands. This tendency of the Catholic Irish to congregate in the large cities was seen to be attended by consequences so injurious both morally and materially to the well-being of the immigrants, that efforts were made from time to time to withdraw them from the large cities in which they arrived and to settle them on the land. Bishop Fenwick of Boston planted a colony in Maine, and Bishop Reynolds of Charleston, S. C., diverted some of the immigrants from Liverpool to his diocese. About 1848-50, two French bishops, Mathias Loras of Dubuque and Joseph Cretin of St. Paul, induced and helped many of the Irish to settle in the states of Iowa and Minnesota, and in 1850 Bishop Andrew Byrne of Little Rock welcomed a colony of Irish Catholics brought over by Father Hoar of Wexford. Of these latter, only a small number remained in Arkansas, the rest going to Iowa, where they established a colony known as "New Ireland".
After the Civil War the question of Irish colonization engaged the attention of various prelates, including Archbishop John Ireland (then Bishop) of St. Paul, who established the St. Paul Catholic Colonization bureau; through his efforts various colonies were established in Minnesota. Later, in May, 1879, the Irish Catholic Colonization Association of the United States was established at Chicago, under the auspices of various archbishops, with the co-operation of eminent Irish Catholic laymen, and during the ensuing decade it assisted many immigrants to find homes in the Western states. Other parish or local societies took up the work of colonization in their own neighbourhood, and successful colonies were established in Minnesota and Kansas. In all these organized efforts at colonization the promoters have aimed to provide for the religious needs of the colonists, by securing the services of priests and the building of churches and schools, at the same time that homes and other material assistance were provided for them. These movements for the colonization of Irish immigrants differed from the ordinary schemes of emigration in that the promoters did not invite or encourage the Irish to leave their native land, but for those who had arrived or resolved to come they sought to provide homes free from the distressing and degraded conditions which so many of those who remained in the large cities had to face.
The entire white population of the Colonies at the outbreak of hostilities in 1775 has been estimated by various authorities, including the historian Bancroft, at 2,100,000, of which about one-third was settled in New England, and the remaining two-thirds in New York, Pennsylvania, and the Southern Colonies. Dr. Carroll estimated the Catholics in all the Colonies at that time at 25,000. It is well known that a considerable number of the colonists were adverse to the War of Independence, and these refrained from giving any support to the struggling Colonies. Lecky estimates (England in the Eighteenth century, IV, 153) that one-half of the Americans were either openly or secretly hostile to the revolution. Other writers are content to fix the proportion of those who were disaffected towards the cause of the patriots at one-third of the entire population. but the records show very few, if any, Irish, whether Catholics or Protestants, among those lukewarm patriots. On the contrary, Irish immigrants, and the sons of Irishmen in the various colonies were among the most active and unwavering supporters in the cause of liberty. Ramsay says, in his "History of the American Revolution", II, 311: "the Irish in America, with few exceptions, were attached to independence". Whether in the counsels of state, or while enduring the hardships of military service, or by the material and financial support which they gave to the struggling colonists, they contributed so generously of their blood and treasure that without their aid the issue of the contest may well appear doubtful.
In June, 1779, when Parliament was investigating the reverses sustained by the British armies in their American campaigns, Joseph Galloway, who had held various offices under the Crown in Philadelphia until the evacuation of that city in 1778 was asked: "That part of the rebel army that enlisted in the service of congress were they chiefly composed of natives of America, or were the greatest part of them English, Scotch and Irish?" His answer was: "The names and places of their nativity being taken down, I can answer the question with precision. They were scarcely one-fourth natives of America; about one-half Irish; the other fourth English and Scotch." And this was confirmed by the English Major General Robinson, who, testifying before the same committee, said: "I remember General Lee telling me that half of the rebel army were from Ireland" ("House of Commons Reports", 5th Session, 14th Parliament, III, 303, 431; see also "The Evidence as given before a committee of the House of Commons on the detail and conduct of the American War, London, 1785", cited in Bagenal, "The American Irish", p. 12). And these facts gave point to the taunt thrown at the ministers by Lord Mountjoy during the debate in Parliament over the repeal of the Penal Laws: "You have lost America through the Irish." "It is a fact beyond question" says Plowden, "that most of the early successes in America were immediately owing to the vigorous exertions and prowess of the Irish immigrants who bore arms in that cause" (Historical Review of the State of Ireland, II, 178). The historians Marmion and Gordon write to the same effect.
Speaking of the Irish immigrants a recent American writer, Douglas Campbell says: "They contributed elements to American thought and life without which the United States of today would be impossible. By them American Independence was first openly advocated and but for their efforts seconding those of New England Puritans that Independence would not have been secured" (The Puritan in Holland, England, and America, II, 471). And Lecky speaking of the Ulster emigrants writes: "They went with hearts burning with indignation, and in the War of Independence they were almost to a man on the side of the insurgents. They supplied some of the best soldiers of Washington. The famous Pennsylvania Line was mostly Irish" (op. cit., II, 262). So, too, we may add, the Maryland Line was largely made up of Irish exiles or of the sons of Irishmen. The colonial records of New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, the Carolinas and other localities show that from Lexington to Yorktown Irishmen took part in every campaign, and W. E. Robinson declares, "There was no battlefield in the Revolution in which Irish blood did not flow freely for American Independence". Nor did the Irish shrink from making large pecuniary sacrifices for the cause. In 1870, when the Continental Army, severely tried by nearly five years of exhausting struggle, was in desperate straits for necessary clothing and supplies, to say nothing of the pay of the troops, a fund of two million dollars was raised by subscription from ninety of the most prominent American patriots in the Pennsylvania Colony. Twenty-nine of these subscribers were Irish either by birth or parentage, all members of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, and their united subscriptions amounted to four hundred and forty thousand dollars.
Among the signers of the Declaration of Independence thirteen (some authorities claim more) were of Irish origin. They were Matthew Thorton and William Whipple who signed for New Hampshire, James Smith, James Wilson, and George Taylor of Pennsylvania, Thomas Lynch, Jr., and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, George Read and Thomas McKean of Delaware, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland, Thomas Nelson, Jr., of Virginia, William Hooper of North Carolina, and Philip Livingston of New York. It was promulgated over the signatures of the President of the Continental Congress and of Charles Thompson, its Irish secretary. Col. John Nixon, a member of the Committee of Safety and son of an Irishman born in the County of Wexford, first read that document to a great concourse of people assembled in the State House yard, Philadelphia, and it was first printed from the press of another Irishman, John Dunlap of Tyrone, who had already (1771) started the "Pennsylvania Packet", the first daily newspaper published in the United States. The convention whose deliberation produced the written constitution upon which the Government rests, included among its members a large proportion of Irishmen. Prominent among them were William Livingston, the first Governor of New Jersey, William Paterson, later to be Governor of the same state, Daniel Carroll of Maryland, Thomas FitzSimons of Philadelphia, George Read of Delaware, Richard Dobbs Spaight, afterwards Governor of North Carolina and Hugh Williamson of the same state, Pierce Butler and John Rutledge of South Carolina, the latter to become afterwards Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. One of the most influential men in the service of the struggling patriots was Charles Thompson, born in the County of Derry, Ireland, who had arrived at Newcastle, Delaware, in 1740. He was the confidential friend of every leader of the Colonies throughout the struggle, and his knowledge of affairs and administrative capacity were so universally conceded that he was chosen secretary of the First Continental Congress, serving the succeeding congresses in the same capacity for a period of fourteen years.
Among the officers of Irish nationality in the Continental Army who won distinction by brilliant service, we may name the following. General Henry Knox, son of a Belfast emigrant, who was master of ordnance, served in every battle with Washington, and was appointed first secretary of War on the organization of Government in 1789. General John Stark, the hero of Bennington, another native of Ireland. General Anthony Wayne whose father had emigrated from Limerick, and who commanded the troops sometimes known as the "Line of Ireland". His successful campaigns in Georgia and the Carolinas and at the battle of Monmouth are historic. For his services, including the recapture of Stony Point from the British, Congress voted him its thanks and a gold medal. General Richard Montgomery, a native of Donegal, in command of the expedition to Canada, who fell before Quebec in 1775, one of the earliest victims in the cause of American liberty. A monument to him in St. Paul's churchyard in the city of New York marks the nation's appreciation of his services. General Stephan Moylan, a native of Cork, of which city his brother was the Catholic bishop. He was First Quartermaster General of the Continental Army and afterwards commanded the Pennsylvania troops known as Moylan's Dragoons. Richard Butler, a native of Kilkenny, who participated in many engagements, and was present at the surrender of Yorktown. Daniel Morgan, a native of Ballinascreen, County Derry, Ireland, the hero of Cowpens, North Carolina, where with five hundred men, mostly Irish, and sons of Irishmen, he defeated twice the number of British troops and took many of them prisoners. Edward Hand, a native of county Kerry, who had served as surgeon of the Irish brigade (of France) in Canada. On the retirement of the French, he cast his lot with the Americans and served throughout the Revolutionary War with distinction. Andrew Lewis, an emigrant from Donegal, who came to Virginia in 1732, and served with his four brothers until the close of the war. His statue in Capitol Square in the city of Richmond shows that his adopted state, Virginia, recognized him as one of her most distinguished sons. George Clinton was the son of Charles Clinton, and native of Longford, Ireland, who landed at Cape Cod in 1729. Besides his military service he became the first Governor of New York, in which capacity he served twenty-one years and was then (1801) chosen Vice-President of the United States. His brother James was in charge of one of the New York regiments and succeeded to the command made vacant by the death of General Montgomery, and his nephew De Witt Clinton became governor of that state in 1817. John Sullivan, one of the most distinguished commanders in the Revolutionary War, was son of John Sullivan, an Irish immigrant from Limerick who settled in Belfast, Maine in 1723. His capture of Fort William and Mary near Portsmouth in 1774, was the first blow struck for independence. Besides many other civil offices which he filled after the close of the war, he was President of the Commonwealth of New Hampshire. His brother James Sullivan was chosen Governor of Massachusetts. In addition we might name General Walter Stewart and William Irvine, who regiments formed part of the famous Pennsylvania Line. William Thompson, William Maxwell, James Hogan, John Rutledge, brother of Edward Rutledge, one of the signers, Colonel Charles Lynch, son of John Lynch, an Irish immigrant who with his brother John founded the settlement now known as Lynchburg, Va., besides many others whose names would unduly extend this list. In recounting the part taken by the Irish in achievement of our independence, it would be ungracious if we neglected to record the presence and the services of those other Irish who, equally exiles as their brothers in America, had taken service in the armies of France and had thereby become allies in that memorable struggle, fighting American battles both by sea and land under the banner of the fleur-de-lis. We refer especially to the Dillon and Walsh regiments of Catholic and Irish troops which in October, 1781, under de Rochambeau and de Grassi helped to surround the army of Cornwallis at Yorktown and compelled its surrender to the "combined forces of America and France".
The first naval engagement of the War of Independence was fought and won 11 May, 1775, shortly after the battle of Lexington, by Jeremiah O'Brien of Machias, Maine. This son of an Irish immigrant with his four brothers and a few other townsmen went out in O'Brien's lumber schooner "The Liberty", and against great odds attacked and captured the British armed schooner, "Margaretta", the captain of which had previously ordered the pine tree set up in the town as a liberty pole to be taken down. Easily the foremost figure in the naval service of the American patriots was the Catholic Irishman John Barry, a native of Wexford, to whom a commission was issued by the Continental Congress on 14 October, 1775, when he was placed in command of the "Lexington" and later commanded the "Alliance". With the former he captured the British war vessel the "Atlanta", and, adds the historian, "the 'Lexington' was thus the first vessel that bore the Continental flag to victory upon the ocean" (see Preble, "Origins of the Flag", p. 243). How highly Barry's character and ability were esteemed may be judged from the circumstance that the British General Howe offered £2000 and the command of the best frigate in the English navy if he would abandon the service of the patriots; to which Barry made the memorable answer that he had devoted himself to the cause of his country and not the value and command of the whole English fleet could seduce him from it (see Frost, "History of the American Navy", p. 86). On 4 July, 1794, after the Government had regularly organized its navy, its first commission was issued to John Barry who thus became its senior captain, the highest rank then known in the naval service. These appointments, together with his devoted service continued throughout the war, clearly justify the designation of "Father of the American Navy" accorded to Barry. His remains are interred in St. Mary's Catholic Churchyard in Philadelphia and a life-sized statue erected (1906) by the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick within the precincts of Independence Hall attests to the esteem in which Barry as held. It should not be overlooked that Barry's life as a Catholic was as consistent and edifying as his public career was patriotic and valuable to the country of his adoption.
In the second war with England (1812) the services rendered by the Irishmen and the sons of Irishmen were among the most important in that memorable context. Johnson Blakely, who fought and captured the British frigate "Reindeer", was Irish by birth. Steven Decatur, who captured the "Macedonian" was of Irish parentage. So were Charles Stewart, Captain James Lawrence, and Thomas McDonough whose victory on Lake Champlain was a famous achievement. At the battle of Lake Erie the British fleet was almost annihilated, and the most brilliant naval victory of the war was won under the command of Oliver Hazard Perry, the son of an Irish mother (Sarah Alexander). On land, the last decisive battle of the war, that at New Orleans, was won by troop largely of Irish origin under the leadership of Andrew Jackson, another son of Irish parents.
The devotion of the Irish in America to the country of their adoption and their readiness to sacrifice themselves in her defence were again conspicuously demonstrated when the safety of the republic was imperilled by the unfortunate Civil War. During that long struggle (1861-1865), Irish patriotism and Irish valour were everywhere in evidence, and impartial historians have freely acknowledged the great and important military service rendered by the Irish element in defence of the Union. There are no statistics showing the full percentage of the Irish element in the federal services in that war, but that it constituted a very large proportion there can be no doubt. A table published by C. G. Lee of Washington, an authority on the statistics of the Civil War, shows the enlistment in the Union army of 144,200 men of Irish birth. D. P. Conyngham, the historian of the Irish brigade, estimated the number of Irishmen so enlisted at 175,000 (see "The Irish Brigade and its Campaigns", p. 8). but these figures very inadequately represent the part taken by Irishmen and their descendants in the defense of the Union. In the analysis of the nationality of 337,800 soldiers from the State of New York, compiled by B. A. Gould, actuary of the U. S. Sanitary Commission (see "New York in the War of the Rebellion", p. 49, by Frederick Phisterer, late Captain of the U. S. Army), the race or nationality by birth of 230,267 of them was obtained by official records and, estimating from these it was found that of such total number of soldiers supplied from that state there were:
Natives of the United States: 203,622
Of foreign birth: 134,178
the latter being divide as follows:
Natives of Ireland: 51,206
Natives of Germany: 36,680
Natives of British America: 19,985
Natives of England: 14,024
Natives of other foreign countries: 12,283
Total: 134,178
Of those registered as natives of the United States, it is safe to assert that a large part was made up of sons of Irish parents and, judging from the history of Canadian immigration, that the number credited to British America included many others, sons of Irish emigrants to Canada who, later, had taken up their residence in the United States. In view of the great extent of the Irish element already present in the population registered as native-born, as before indicated, it can hardly be questioned that at least one-fourth of the soldiers so recorded were descendants of Irish immigrants. If to these we add only a fraction of those registered as native to British America, sons of Irish emigrants who had landed in Canada before taking up residence in the United States the Irish race would appear to have furnished about one-third of the entire quota of soldiers supplied by the State of New York in defence of the Union. But the troops from other states, notably Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Illinois, included in each case a large contingent of soldiers of Irish birth or descent, whose number may fairly be estimated as between one-third and one-fourth of the total number of troops supplied by those several states. Not a few regiments were composed almost exclusively of men of Irish birth or Irish descent, such as the 9th and 28th Massachusetts volunteers under the command of Colonel Cahill and Colonel Richard Byrnes respectively, and later under Colonel Thomas Cass (who fell at Malvern Hill) and Colonel Patrick Guiney; the 88th New York Volunteers under Colonel Patrick Kelly, and the 69th of the same state which assembled under the order of their colonel, Michael Corcoran, bidding his men to "rally to the support of the Constitution and the laws of the United States" — a sentiment which was the inspiration of the subsequent outpouring of Irish soldiers in defence of the Union; 116th Pennsylvania Volunteers, recruited in Philadelphia, and later forming part of Meagher's Irish brigade, which went to the front in command of Colonel Dennis Heenan; the 37th N.Y. (Irish Rifles); and Meagher's Zouaves under the command of Thomas F. Meagher.
At the very outset of the war, an Irish brigade made up of about 2000 Catholic Irishmen was organized in Chicago by Colonel James A Mulligan, who after four years of hard service fell mortally wounded in one of the engagements at Winchester, Va. An Irish legion, composed almost exclusively of Irish Catholic soldiers, was mustered into service as the 90th Illinois Volunteers, recruited largely through the exertions of an Irish priest, Father Dunn, and was one of the first regiments to respond to the president's call for troops. The first fortification thrown up for the defence of Washington was Fort Corcoran, on Arlington Heights, built by the men of the New York 69th Regiment. When the ranks of these regiments had been thinned by death or from disability by wounds or disease, they were filled with fresh volunteers, many of them being immigrants only recently arrived from Ireland. One of these, the 69th of New York, was thus recruited thrice during the war. Besides these entire regiments of Irish soldiers, there were many regiments from the different states, each containing one or more companies composed exclusively of Irishmen. Later the Irish brigade of New York was organized under the command of General Thomas F. Meagher, with the 69th as its nucleus, the 63rd and 88th regiments of New York being added, numbering in all over 2500 men. Another Irish legion, better known as the Corcoran Legion, composing four full regiments, namely the 69th, 115th, 164th and 170th, was organized in 1862 by General Michael Corcoran upon his return to New York after a year's confinement in a confederate war prison. Irish priests, among then Rev. (now Archbishop) John Ireland, Bernard O'Reilly, Lawrence S. McMahon, afterwards Bishop of Hartford, William Corby, Thomas J. Mooney, James Dillon, John Scully, Daniel Mullen, Philip Sheridan, Paul Gillan, Edward McKee, and others, accompanied the regiments as chaplains, sharing the hardships of war with them. To recount the deeds of the Irish soldiers in that war would be to write a history of most of its important battles. At Antietam, Williamsburg, Fair Oaks, Chickahominy, Malvern Hill, Chancerlorsville, Spottsylvania, Bull Run, Gettysburg, the Wilderness and Fredericksburg, the Irish soldier was found in the fore-front of battle, braving every danger, and unhesitatingly giving up life itself in defence of the flag of his adopted country.
The official war records contain frequent acknowledgement of the valuable service rendered by Irish regiments in these various battles, and distinguished officers in both contending armies have testified to the heroic conduct of the Irish soldier. There are no statistics to show the total number of men of Irish blood who in the various armies and during the four years of struggle gave their lives in defence of their country but it was unquestionably very great. At Fredericksburg alone, in the memorable attack on Marye's Heights, the Irish brigade was so depleted that the number of men remaining alive was so small that not enough were left over for a general to command, and General Meagher, their commander, thereupon resigned his commission (see "The Irish Brigade", pp. 349, 350, 356). According to the statistics over 4000 men of the brigade and legion lost their lives on the field of battle, or of wounds received, or of disease contracted in the service. The 69th New York lost 998 men during the war. At Antietam, out of 18 officers and 210 men engaged, it lost in killed and wounded 16 officers and 112 men. Out of 1703 men enlisted in the Irish 28th of Massachusetts from the organization to the close of service, the killed, wounded, and missing in action reached the large number of 1133, of whom 408 were killed or wounded in the campaign of the Wilderness (The Irish Brigade, p. 586). And the last Union general killed in the war was the Irish General Thomas H. Smith, who fell at Petersburg on April, 1865.
Space does not permit an enumeration of all the names of men of Irish blood who held responsible command in the Union armies of that war. Some of the generals were Logan, Lalor, and Dougherty of Illinois, Gorman of Minnesota, Magenis and Sullivan of Indiana, Reilly and Mulligan of Ohio, Stevenson of Missouri, and with him James Shields, already a hero of two wars and United States Senator from three states, Shirley of Michigan, Smith of Delaware, Meagher, Corcoran, Patrick H. O'Rourke, P. H. Jones, and Thomas F. Sweeney of New York, George G. Meade, Geary, and Birney of Pennsylvania, McPherson, McDowell, and McCook, the dashing Phil McKearney, and George B. McClellan. It was another Irishman's son, "little" Phil Sheridan, the greatest cavalry leader of the war, whose brilliant work just preceding the surrender at Appomattox undoubtedly contributed greatly to that result. When hostilities ceased, Sheridan as lieutenant general occupied the next to highest rank in the military service of the country, while at the same time the highest command in the navy was held by Admiral Porter, the descendant of an Irishman, the next highest command being held by Admiral Rowan, a native-born Irishman.
While men of the Irish race were engaged on the battlefield in defence of their adopted country, accompanied and encouraged by the clergy, the religious orders of women within the Church were no less diligent in nursing the sick and wounded in camps and hospitals. Among these volunteer nurses it is no exaggeration to say that the Irish element predominated. Thus in July, 1862, at the request of the Secretary of War, a band of seven Sisters of Mercy left New York and took charge of the Soldiers' Hospital at Beaufort, N. C. which was later on transferred to Newbern. This was in charge of Mother Augustine McKenna, a native of County Monaghan, Ireland. Several of these, exhausted by the hardships incident to their work, gave up their lives only to be replaced by others from their community in New York. The hospital at Jefferson City, Mo. was put in charge of another company of nuns of the same order who came from their home in Chicago, and when this institution had to be abandoned, they took charge of the hospital department of the steamboat "Empress", which was about to start for the battlefield of Shiloh. These Chicago sisters were in charge of Mother Alphonsus Butler, and Confederate and Union soldiers alternately came under their care (see "Annals of the Sisters of Mercy", III, 279, 284). The Stanton and Douglas military hospitals were placed in charge of the same sisters. The Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul sent from Emmitsburg and other houses many of their members, whose ministrations in the hospital at Norfolk and elsewhere elicited the grateful admiration of Protestant and Catholic alike.
The Hospital of the Good Samaritan at Cincinnati was the gift of some enlightened and appreciative Protestant gentlemen to Sister Anthony, born at Limerick, whose services in the field hospitals had won for her the title of "Ministering Angel of the Army of the Tennessee" (see McGuire, "Irish in America", p. 482). The earliest use of the Mercy Hospital at Pittsburgh, established by the Irish Sisters of Mercy, was for the relief of the sick and disabled soldiers returning from the Mexican War, 1848. At Helena and Little Rock, Ark., hospitals were maintained by the same community, who served the sick and wounded, now of the Union, next of the Confederate, forces, as the fortunes of war shifted the control of the territory in which the hospital stood. There were Irish women in the community of the Sisters of St. Joseph who served at Harrisburg, caring for the disabled soldiers and taking charge of the floating hospitals that received the wounded from the Virginia battle-fields. The same community afterwards (1864) opened and maintained an asylum at Philadelphia for the orphaned daughters of the Union soldiers of the Civil War (Hist. Sketch of the Church in Philadelphia, p. 193), and all over the country the orphans, made such by war, found shelter under the hospitable roofs of one or another of the religious communities, whose members were largely of the Irish race.
The record of the service rendered by the Irish in that war would be incomplete without reference to the part taken by John Hughes, the great Irish Archbishop of New York. This distinguished prelate, the friend of President Abraham Lincoln and his Secretary of State, William H. Seward, undertook at their request a confidential mission to Europe in 1861, where at the French Court and in other influential circles he advocated the justice of the conduct of the government at Washington in resisting the secession of the States and the consequent disruption of the Union. At that time the British Government and English public men with few notable exceptions had manifested their hostility to the Government, as they continued to do afterwards, and efforts were being made (as was believed) to engage France in an alliance with England, with a view to their joint acknowledgment of the Southern States as an independent nation. This would have entitled the Confederacy to all the rights of a belligerent, and would have permitted England to become its ally openly and to furnish troops and supplies in support of the rebellion. But the efforts in question failed, and the Government gratefully acknowledged the patriotic services performed by Archbishop Hughes in that behalf.
But the genius of the Irish race, which thus helped found the Republic and to preserve it when it needed defenders, was not lacking in times of peace in the development of the country and in the practice of the arts and sciences. One of the greatest enterprises of the last century, and the one which contributed most to the supremacy of the State of New York, namely the construction of the Erie Canal, was planned and carried out during the year 1817-18 by De Witt Clinton, then governor of that state, who was a descendant of Charles Clinton, himself an immigrant, born at Longford, Ireland, as already noted. But this great enterprise had already, as early as 1874, been publicly advocated by another Irish immigrant, Christopher Coles, then living in the city of New York, who had been an engineer and an instructor in the Continental Army. With almost prophetic insight, the same Irish immigrant proposed a system of water supply for New York City by means of aqueducts, models of which he publicly exhibited, thus anticipating by more than half a century the existing Croton aqueduct system. Another Irishman's son, James Sullivan, Governor of Massachusetts, projected the Middlesex (Mass,) Canal. It is a well-known fact that the actual work of construction of the railroads and canals during the greater part of the last century was accomplished mainly by Irish hands and Irish energy. In the higher plane of railroad operation Irish talent and ability have been constantly in evidence, and in the honest and successful administration of the affairs of a railroad system, no name stands higher than that of the late Samuel Sloan, an emigrant from the north of Ireland. An Irish surveyor, Jasper O'Farrell, laid out the city of San Francisco. Among the California pioneers (1828) there were Irish Martins, Sullivans, and Murphys, including Don Timotheo Murphy, who had lived two years in Peru, and who with O'Farrell gave the land on which the first orphan asylum in San Francisco was built. In later days, the Floods, Friars, and O'Briens are associated with the successful development of the great mining industries of that state, while Eugene Kelly, another great Catholic Irishman of San Francisco, stands out as a type of the successful merchant and banker.
In scientific investigation and discovery, Robert Fulton, whose name is identified with the first success of steam navigation in America, Samuel F. B. Morse of electric telegraph fame, and Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the mowing machine, which has revolutionized agricultural operations the world over were sons or grandsons of Irish immigrants from Ulster. The cotton industry, to which new England owes so much of its wealth, had its beginning in the inventions and improvements in machinery designed by, and under the direction of Patrick, Tracy, Jackson, the son of an Irish immigrant, who had settled at Newburyport, Mass. A cotton mill erected by him in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1813, is said to have probably been the first one in the world to have combined all the operations necessary for converting the raw cotton into finished cloth (see McGee, "Irish Settlers, etc.", p. 217-218. It was the same Patrick Tracey Jackson who founded the city of Lowell (named after his partner in business) and connected that city with metropolis of New England by building the Boston and Lowell Railroad (McGee, op cit., 220-222).
Passing to the arts, we find that in the country's history, many representatives of the Irish race who have risen to eminence, Thus in sculpture, Thomas Crawford, whose statue of Armed Liberty surmounts the dome of the Capitol in Washington, and whose bronze doors at the entrance to the building are a notable work of art; Launt Thompson; Martin and Joseph Milmore; James E. Kelly, and Augustus St. Gaudens, whose statues of Lincoln in Chicago and Farragut and Sherman in New York, and the Parnell memorial in Dublin (his last work), are among his admired productions. In architecture, the young Irishman, James Hoban, resident of Charleston, whose plan for the construction of the Executive Mansion (the White House) at Washington was adopted in competition with others. In portrait painting, John Singleton Copley, Charles C. Ingam, and John Ramage, accounted the best miniature painter of his time (1789), and to whom George Washington sat for his portrait; William McGrath, J. Francis Murphy, Thomas Hovedon, and Thomas S. Cummings. Asa Gray, the famous botanist, was the grandson of an immigrant from Ulster. In horticulture, John Barry and William Doogue, who laid out the grounds of the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia, and the Public Gardens at Boston, were of Irish birth. In music, Patrick S. Gilmore. As exponents of the dramatic art, Lawrence Barrett, John McCullough, William James Florence, Dion Boucicault, John Brougham, John Drew, Barney Williams (O'Flaherty) stand forth as types of Irish genius which instructed and delighted bygone generations. In literature the American Irish may claim as representative of their race the scholarly Kenricks, Francis Patrick, Archbishop of Baltimore, and Peter Richard, Archbishop of St. Louis, both born in Dublin, John England, Bishop of Charleston, a native of Cork, Edmund O'Callghan, the historian of New York, John Mitchell, Brother Azarius (P.F. Mullany), John Gilmary Shea, John O'Kane Murray, Father James Fittin, the historian of the Church in New England, Rev. Stephen Byrne, O. S. D., Rev. John O'Brien, Rev. Bernard O'Reilly, Matthew Carey, James McShery, Henry Giles, William E. Robinson ("Richelieu"), John R.G. Hassard, for many years managing editor of the "New York Tribune", D. P. Conyngham, and many others. Among the poets are John Savage, Rev. Abram J. Ryan, the 'poet priest of the South", Rev. W.D. Kelly, Richard Dalton Williams, physician and littérateur, John Boyle O'Reilly, whose excellent verse rivals, if it does not surpass his prose writings, Charles G. Halpine (Miles O'Reilly), and Theodore O'Hara, whose lyric "The Bivouac of the Dead" will ever remain a classic.
Among the journalists and publishers of Irish birth or parentage, we may name John Dunlap, publisher (1771) of the "Pennsylvania Packet"; Matthew Carey who (1785) founded the "Pennsylvania Herald" and in 1790 issued the first Catholic Bible published in the United States; Matthew Lyon, the "Hampden of Congress" who (1793) published the "Farmer's Library", one of the earliest newspaper published in Vermont; George Pardow of the "Truth Teller" 1828; Rev. R. J. O'Flaherty, who edited "The Jesuit", and his successors, the publishers and editors of the "Boston Pilot", namely, Patrick Donahue, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Rev. John Roddan, John Boyle O'Reilly; Thomas O'Connor, publisher of the "Shamrock", whose son Charles became the most distinguished jurist of his time; Bishop John England, who founded and edited the "Catholic Miscellany"; Rev. James Keogh, first editor of the "Philadelphia Catholic Standard"; Bishop Michael O'Connor, who founded the "Pittsburgh Catholic", and Rev. Tobias Mullen, afterwards Bishop of Erie, who continued its publication; Bernard Dornin, an exile with Emmet and MacNevin, and John Doyle, early publishers of Catholic books in New York; Dr. P. E. Moriarty, O. S. A., distinguished both as a writer and controversialist; Daniel W. Mahoney and Charles A. Hardy, who published "The Catholic Standard" of Philadelphia and later "The American Catholic Quarterly Review", under the editorship of the scholarly Dr. James A. Cocoran; James A. McMaster, editor of the "Freeman's Journal"; Patrick J. Meehan, of the "Irish American"; Edward Dungan and James B. Kirker and their successor; Felix E. O'Rourke, Denis and James Sadlier, all of New York; Eugene Cummiskey and John Murphy of Baltimore; Lawrence Kehoe of New York; besides many other Irishmen and sons of Irishmen whose names are identified with Irish and Catholic journalism and the publication of Irish and Catholic literature in the United States. Prominent in the ranks of secular journalism were Horace Greeley, of the "New York Tribune", E. L. Godkin, of the "New York Evening Post", William Cassidy of the "Albany Argus", Henry O'Reilly of the "Rochester Adviser", and Hugh J. Hastings.
Nearly one-half of all the presidents of the United States have been of Celtic extraction. The list includes James Monroe, James K. Polk, Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Ulysses S. Grant, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, Andrew Johnson, and William McKinley. And at no time since the establishment of the Government has the Irish race been without representation in Congress, among the judiciary, in the diplomatic service, and in the cabinets of presidents. Many of the men named for their distinguished military services afterwards held posts of honour in the civil service of the Government. To the names already mentioned of patriots of the Revolution, who afterwards became governors or chief justices of their respective states, we may add William Claiborne, of Irish birth, first Governor of Louisiana when that state was admitted to the Union (1812), Andrew Jackson, Governor of Florida, General James Shields, first Governor of the Oregon Territory, Thomas F. Meagher, first Governor of Montana territory, and Edward Kavanaugh, Governor of Maine in 1843. At the bar and on the bench the list of names of Irish men who acquired distinction would fill a volume. When an attempt was made in 1813 in a New York court to compel the Jesuit Father Anthony Kohlman to disclose matters communicated to him in a confession, it was the Irish Presbyterian lawyer, William Sampson, one of the exiles of '98, who justified Father Kohlman's refusal to reveal the information thus acquired and vindicated the principal (since incorporated in statute law) protecting ministers of the Gospel against being compelled to disclose matters so communicated. Another Irish exile, Thomas Addis Emmet, attained distinction as one of the leaders of the bar in New York. In later days James T. Brady, David Graham, Charles O'Connor, John McKeon, Charles P. Daly, who to his judicial accomplishments added those of broad scholarship and served for many years as President of the American Geographical Society, Robert J. Dillon, Richard O. Gorman of New York, Francis Kernan of Utica, afterwards U. S. Senator from New York, Bernard Casserly, U. S. Senator from California, Daniel Dougherty of Philadelphia, Patrick A. Collins of Boston, are a few only of the names of men of that profession who by their talents and high character have reflected honour on the race from which they sprang.
In medicine another distinguished Irish exile of '98, William James MacNevin, achieved national reputation in his profession. Prior to his time, Edward Hand, John Hart, Richard Ferguson and Ephraim McDowell, all natives of Ireland, had attained distinction as practitioners in this country. Irish physicians and surgeons were found attached to all the Irish regiments serving in the Civil War. A few are now surviving, honoured wherever known. Together they constituted a body of devoted and self-sacrificing men, true to the noblest ideals of their profession. In 1902 it was an Irish American, Surgeon Major James Carroll, who with another United States Army surgeon deliberately submitted himself to the perilous experiment then being made by the Government to ascertain by what means the yellow-fever germ was transmitted. As a result he contracted the disease and gave up his life as a sacrifice in the cause of science for the good of humanity. To the American-born son of Irish immigrants, Dr. Joseph O'Dwyer, humanity the world over is indebted for the process of intubation of the larynx in cases of diphtheria and the invention of the instruments used in that operation. Always known for his charities, Dr. O'Dwyer declined to patent his invention, thereby sacrificing large pecuniary gains. The merit of these inventions was recognized by the medical profession both in this country and in Europe, and their use has resulted in saving the lives of thousands of children. The Carney Hospital, devoted to the relief of suffering humanity, was a gift to the citizens of Boston from Andrew Carney, a successful Irishman resident in that city. A similar foundation was established at St. Louis, Mo., named after the donor, John Mullanphy, another prosperous Irishman, who likewise established the Mullanphy orphanage, a religious and charitable endowment at St. Louis.
Cornelius Heeny, an Irishman resident in Brooklyn, gave a large estate to the "Brooklyn Benevolent Society" in trust for the poor, and especially poor orphan children, and procured the incorporation of the society, which continues to administer his charity. Still another Irish immigrant, Judge Miles P. O'Connor, established and endowed a home for orphans at San José, Cal., besides distributing a large fortune during his lifetime towards the support of works of charity and religion throughout the country. A statue in one of the public squares of New Orleans, inscribed "Margaret", marks the appreciation of the people of that community for Margaret Haughery, an Irishwoman whose charitable labours during life won for her the title of "the orphan's friend", and who bequeathed a considerable fortune for the support of the orphan asylum which she had greatly helped to establish. Of the lesser gifts of Irish men and women to the cause of religion and humanity it would be impossible to give even a summary. It is enough to state that no people have given more freely or more steadily for these object than have the Irish, and that a great number of the churches, chapels, convents, hospitals, asylums, and homes for sick and destitute humanity which are the boast of the present generation have all had their origin in the piety, goodwill, and generous contributions of the early Irish immigrants and their descendants.
A notable feature in the history of the Irish arriving in this country has been their tendency to associate themselves in societies composed exclusively of persons of their own race. As early as 1737 we find twenty-six "Gentlemen, merchants and others, natives of Ireland or of Irish extraction" assembled at Boston on St. Patrick's Day to organize the Charitable Irish Society. The professed object of their association was to relieve their fellow-countrymen who might be in need and to preserve the spirit of Irish nationality. With like purpose the Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick was established at Philadelphia in 1771, the New York society of the same name in 1784, the Hibernian Society for the Relief of Emigrants from Ireland in Philadelphia in 1790, and the Hibernian Society of Charleston, S. C., in 1799. Later on, and as the Irish element in the population increased, similar societies were established in other cities with the same benevolent purposes. In all of them the bond of union was the Irish nationality of the members either by birth or parentage, and the maintenance of such national spirit was one of the objects of the society. But this devotion to the history and traditions of their native land was constantly and inseparably coupled with an unwavering attachment to their adopted country and the Irish in America have demonstrated beyond question that their affection for the land from which they or their fathers had sprung was no hindrance to the discharge of their duty as American citizens. Indeed, it needed no declaration to prove that men who were thus associated were devoted to the interests of their adopted country, for the list of men who, having done valiant service for that country in its hour of need, became later the trusted officers of the Government which they had helped to establish, and held high rank in the social and business circles of the respective communities in which they lived.
With the great increase in the volume of immigration in later years (we refer to the period since 1820), the Irish immigrants, both those newly arriving, then mostly Catholics, as well as those already residing in the country, found themselves confronted with a deep-seated sense of antagonism based on both racial and religious prejudice entertained by certain elements of the population. While this spirit of hostility was avowed against all residents of foreign birth, Irish Catholics, by reason of their religion, their large numbers, and the resulting influence which as citizens they exercised in the political contests of the time, were singled out as a class to be especially attacked by this un-American section of the nation. This anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment was of unmistakable English origin. It had its beginning here in the legislation of the Colonies, which, copying the English penal laws directed against Catholic Ireland, proscribed the Catholic religion and ostracized the Irish "Papists". It was embodied in the state church establishments of several of the colonies. Although the principal of freedom of religion was definitely incorporated in the Federal Constitution, yet so persistent and obstinate was this prejudice that it found expression in the original constitutions of various of the states which made the profession of the Protestant religion a condition of holding office in the Government. It was further manifested in the repeated efforts to change the naturalization laws so as to withhold the rights and privileges of citizenship from all immigrants except upon onerous conditions, including a fourteen years' residence in the country.
We are not attempting to detail the history or development of this spirit of prejudice against the Irish Catholic immigrant. Suffice it to say that it was only too real and widespread, and that, under the guidance of bigots and unprincipled agitators, it took shape and form in the various native American and Know-Nothing movements which were organized during the period of 1830 to 1855. As a result of the activities of these associations, Irish Catholics in many parts of the country, almost alone among all classes of the population, were subjected to insult and oppression and were made the victims of mob violence, their dwellings demolished, their families made homeless, their churches and convents fired, and their clergy ill-treated. Prior to any threatening manifestation of this anti-Irish sentiment, there had existed various societies made up of Irishmen or their descendants, known as the Sons of Erin, Montgomery-Greens, Irish Volunteers, various Provident Societies, and others, whose social and benevolent purposes in no wise diminished the patriotic attachment of their members to the country of their adoption. Although the number of such societies and their membership were comparatively small, yet they served as rallying-points for the maintenance of the spirit of Irish nationality, and as centres of the charitable activity of their members. When the fateful spirit of native Americanism darkened the land and the Irish Catholics realized the need of sustaining one another against a common aggressor, these societies multiplied, and many of the Irish thus became proficient in military drill and the use of arms. There were likewise various county associations, composed of immigrants or their descendants from the various counties of Ireland and named after their respective counties.
The great increase in these societies, and the fact that in important political contests their members were arrayed almost in a unit in opposition to political parties identified with these anti-Catholic movements, were made pretexts for accusing the Irish of a certain clannishness which unfitted them to be good citizens. Some, even of their own co-religionists (though not of their race), deplored the fact that the Irish seemed to have isolated themselves from their fellow citizens, and thereby subjected themselves, however undeservedly, to the reproach of having put Irish nationality above American citizenship. But the wrongs committed against the Catholic Irish immigrants (at that time mostly poor and incapable of resistance), the insults and injuries put upon them because of their race and faith, and the attacks upon their persons and property, which almost without exception went unpunished by law, are an effective answer to these criticisms.
In later days many Gaelic societies have been organized, as well as various Home Rule associations and branches of the Irish Land League. Through these organizations the Irish in America have sought to co-operate with their brethren at home in the movements undertaken for the improvement of the political, social, and industrial conditions of the Irish people in their native land, and the success attending those movements is due in large part to the sympathy of the American Irish and their generous contributions of money. The constant affection manifested in a practical way by the Irish in America for their less fortunate brethren in Ireland may be judged by the large amounts of money remitted to the latter out of the earnings of the Irish in this country. As early as 1834 R. R. Madden ascertained (see Madden, "Memoirs", p. 105) that $30,000 was then being sent over annually. This assistance was increased from year to year until during the period from 1848 to 1864 the American Irish sent home no less a sum than £13,000,000, that is $65,000,000 (see Parnell Movement, p. 166). The report of the British Emigration Commissioners for 1873 (cited in O'Rourke, op. cit., p. 503), states that in 1870, £727,408 (equal to $3,000,000) was sent to Ireland from North America, and that in the twenty-three years from 1848 to 1870 £16,634,000 or $83,000,000 was so remitted though banks and commercial houses, apart from the money sent through private channels. The historian whom we have quoted estimates the total transmitted through all channels to relatives and friends in Ireland by the Irish in America at £1,000,000 annually, or in all the enormous sum of over £20,000,000 ($100,000,000) for the twenty-three years proceeding the date when he wrote (1874). That the amount remitted from that time to the present has been equally large, there can hardly be any doubt.
The most prominent, as it is the most distinctively Irish perhaps, among the societies to which we have referred, is the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which was organized in America in the year 1836 for the avowed purpose of promoting friendship, unity, and Christian charity among its members, and the advancement of the principles of Irish nationality. Many of the branches maintain systems of insurance, paying death benefits not exceeding $3,000. In 1908 it had a total membership of 200,000 persons associated in 2365 divisions, distributed in forty-seven states and the territories of the Union. The property owned by the order was valued (1906) at $1,722,069. During the last twenty-three years the order paid out for sick and funeral benefits $7,174,156, and in other charitable donations $4,481,146, besides many contributions for the relief of sufferers from extraordinary calamities, the latest being the gift of $40,000 in aid of those who suffered in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Its contributions in support of education include an endowment of $50,000 to the Catholic University at Washington and $10,000 to Trinity College, Washington, besides over 500 scholarships in various colleges and academies throughout the country, and it has given over $25,000 in aid of the work of the Gaelic League for the revival of the Irish language and literature. Other societies such as The Emerald Beneficial Association, The Irish Catholic Benevolent Union, founded in 1896 for benevolent purposes and composed almost entirely of members of Irish nationality, have a large membership in various states and territories. Besides these societies which are of national extent, numerous other smaller societies have been organized, mostly since 1840, and in the larger cities of the Eastern states, each society comprising immigrants or their descendants from particular counties in Ireland. Their purposes are purely social and benevolent, and their memberships nearly all Catholics.
Of the relations of the Roman Catholic Irish to the Church in America it is almost needless to speak. Not only do the Catholics of other nationalities, but their fellow-citizens of other faiths, acknowledge the great services rendered by the Irish in America to the up-building of the Church. So identified have they been with the progress of the Church that their race and religion united have made them a marked element in the community. The mission of the Irish race, as evidenced by the part they have taken in the support of religion in the United States has been the theme of many writers, and it would be as endless as unnecessary a task to detail here what the Irish have done in that respect. Their number alone, coming from a land where they had suffered so greatly for conscience' sake, implied a corresponding religious activity and influence in the United States where they were released from the restraints to which they were subject at home. With their constantly increasing numbers, they provided in turn the laity with which new congregations were formed and the clergy which supplied to a large extent their spiritual needs. From the time of the first Bishop, John Carroll, of the See of Baltimore, to the present day there is hardly a diocese or archdiocese in continental United States but has been governed by prelates of Irish birth or descent. In the earlier days of the Republic and continuing to about 1830, bishops of other nationalities, chiefly French bishops, had much the larger share in the government of the Church; but with the steady and large accession of the Irish to the Catholic population, the latter acquired a predominance which has ever since been maintained.
At the time of the First Provincial Council of Baltimore (1829) two only of the nine prelates constituting the hierarchy were of Irish birth. At the time of the Third Council (1837) there were four such prelates. In 1846, of the twenty-three diocese represented in the Sixth Council, ten sent bishops of Irish origin. In 1852, of the incumbents of the twenty-seven sees. fifteen were of the Irish race. In 1876 the hierarchy of the Church included four archbishops, who were Irish either by birth or descent, and twenty-eight bishops sprung from the same race. Of the fourteen provinces now (1906) constituting the territorial divisions of the Church in the continental united States, nine are governed by archbishop of Irish blood, and forty-eight of the bishops of the seventy-eight dioceses comprised in these provinces are of the Irish race. The same race has furnished the two cardinals with which the Church in the United States has been honoured, viz.: John McCloskey, formerly Archbishop of New York, and James Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore.
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to apportion the Catholic laity of the present day strictly according to their racial origins, but in view of the immigration figures as before ascertained, and the proportion of ecclesiastics of Irish origin engaged in the service of religion, it is safe to assume that more than one-half of the total number of Catholics in the United States come of Irish stock. As regards the moral and material aid contributed by the Irish in the United States in support of religion, the distinguished French Jesuit Rev. A. J. Thébaud, in his work, "Ireland, Past and Present" (p. 453), quotes approvingly the language of John Francis Maguire, M. P., who says "What Ireland has done for the American Church, every bishop, every priest can tell. Throughout the vast extent of the United States, there is scarcely a church, an academy, a hospital, or a refuge in which the piety, the learning, the zeal, and the self-sacrifice of the Irish — of the priest or the professor, of the Sisters of every order or denomination — are not to be traced; there is scarcely an ecclesiastical seminary for English-speaking students in which the great majority of those now preparing for the service of the sanctuary do not belong, if not by birth, at least by blood, to that historic land to which the grateful church of past ages accorded the proud title, "Insula Sanctorum" (McGuire, "The Irish in America", p. 540).
Still another competent judge, the distinguished Bishop J. L. Spalding, in his work "The Mission of the Irish Race", says (p. 61): "As in another age men spoke of the gesta Dei per Francos, so we may now speak of the gesta Dei per Hibernos. Were it not for Ireland, Catholicism would today be feeble and non-progressive in England, America, and Australia. Nor is the force of this affirmation weakened by the weight and significance which must be given to what the converts in England, and the German and the French in the United States have done for the Church. The Irish have made the work of the convert possible and effective, and they have given to Catholicism in this country a vigour and cohesiveness which enable it to assimilate the most heterogeneous elements, and without which it is not at all certain that the vast majority of Catholics emigrating hither from other lands would not have been lost to the Church, 'No other people', to repeat what I have written elsewhere, 'could have done for the Catholic Church in the United States what the Irish people have done. Their unalterable attachment to their priests; their deep Catholic instincts, which no combination of circumstances has ever been able to bring into conflict with their love of country; the unworldly and spiritual temper of the national character; their indifference to ridicule and contempt and their unfailing generosity, all fitted them for the work which was to be done, and enabled them, in spite of the strong prejudices against their race which Americans have inherited from England, to accomplish what would not have been accomplished by Italian, French, or German Catholics'."
Nowhere in modern times has the Church made such substantial progress as in the United States of America and in the great island commonwealth of Australasia. In both Irish immigration has been a large contributing factor to this development, and between both, notwithstanding the immense intervening distance, there is to be found in the early records a curious correlation of pioneer effort. To the political and economic results of British rule in Ireland both of these countries owe no little part of their present-day vigour and expansion. It was the declaration of American independence that stopped the transportation of British convicts across the Atlantic, and forced the establishment at Botany Bay, in January, 1788, of the first penal settlement on the Australasian continent. Thither the religious persecutions in Ireland and the political disturbances there sent many unfortunate representatives of the race. Thousands of these prisoners, transported from Ireland for political or religious offenses, were exiled without any intimation of the duration of the sentences passed on them by drumhead courts-martial. Hence, under the date of 12 November, 1796, there is record of Governor Hunter writing back from the colony to the authorities of the Home Office in England that the "Irish Defenders were threatening to resist all orders because of the indeterminate term of their sentences, "as they may otherwise be kept longer than is just in servitude". In May, 1802, Governor King also wrote, praying the home government not to send any more Irishmen there, and as "few as possible of those convicted of sedition and republican practices, otherwise in a very short time the whole colony would be imbued with the same seditious spirit."
But their protests had no effect whatever, and the number of exiles constantly increased until in a short time it amounted to more than a thousand. Confessors of the Faith, as most of them were in their native land, they had to face in bondage even more savage persecution under rules framed to compel them to join in Protestant religious services. Deprived of priest, sacraments, and religious instruction, they saw the Government attempting to rob their children of their Faith. Remonstrance to the home authorities was long useless. Among the early Irish political felons transported to Botany Bay were three priests who had been sentenced for alleged complicity in the political troubles of 1798 in Ireland. These priests were Father James Harold, pastor of Rathcoole, Dublin; Father James Dixon, a native of Castlebridge, County Wexford; and Father Peter O'Neill, pastor of Ballymacoda, County Cork, a grand-uncle of the Fenian leader, Peter O'Neill Crowley, who was killed in the rising of 1867. Father O'Neill was not only sentenced on a trumped-up charge of sedition, but was most barbarously flogged before he left Ireland. The frequent remonstrances to the home authorities against the injustice of denying them the ministrations of their Faith had at last lead to the issue of instructions to the Governor in 1802 to allow one of these transported ecclesiastics to exercise his spiritual functions. Governor King accordingly designated, on 19 April, 1803, Father Dixon to take charge of the Catholic congregation, and under this government supervision the first Mass was said by him in Sydney, on Sunday, 15 May, 1803. The chalice was made of tin by one of the convicts; the vestments were fashioned out of some old damask curtains. For a time there was no altar-stone, and the sacred oils had to be brought in from Rio de Janiero. The Holy See, in 1804, made Father Dixon Prefect Apostolic of this new territory, called then New Holland, the first ecclesiastical appointment for the new church. Fathers O'Neill and Harold also received faculties from Rome. The former was allowed to return to Ireland, 15 January, 1803, and the latter was sent to Tasmania, but there is no record that he was allowed to officiate there. This period of toleration did not last long, for, on the persistently circulated reports of bigoted fanatics that the congregations at the Masses were gatherings of traitors and mere subterfuges of the Irish convicts to mature plans for another rebellion, the Governor, before the close of 1804, revoked the permission for the celebration of Mass, and under penalty of twenty-five lashes for the first, and fifty for the second absence, all the colonists without distinction were ordered to attend the Church of England service. Worn out by his long labour and hardships, Father Dixon returned, in 1808, to Ireland, where he died, 4 January, 1840, in his eighty-second year, pastor of Crossabeg in the Diocese of Ferns.
In the archives of Propaganda at Rome, there is a memorandum presented to the congregation, 28 August, 1816, by Rev. Richard Hayes, O. S. F., which begins: "The undersigned certifies that neither in the Colony of Sydney Cove, where there are several thousand Irish Catholics, nor in any part of New Holland, is there at present any priest or Catholic Missionary." Father Hayes' brother, Michael, a native of Wexford, was there as one of those United Irishmen transported after the rebellion of 1798, and had sent word to Rome, where Father Hayes was residing at St. Isodore's convent, of their spiritual destitution. The appeal for help was answered by a Cistercian Father, Jeremiah F. Flynn, who was then in Rome, after labouring for three years in the mission in the West Indies, part of the time under the direction of Archbishop Carroll of Baltimore. He volunteered to go to Australia was secularized and made Prefect Apostolic of New Holland, with faculties to administer the Sacrament of Confirmation. After some delay in getting enough funds for his outfit and making a vain application to the Governor for an official sanction for his project, he set out without this permission and landed at Sydney, 14 November, 1817. Governor Macquire, on whom he called the next day for permission to exercise his ministry, bluntly announced his determination not to allow any Popish missionary to intrude on this Protestant colony, and ordered him to depart on the ship that brought him. On the pretext, therefore, that he had come to the colony without sanction of the British authorities, Father Flynn was arrested and deported back to England. Previous to this he had remained concealed for several weeks in the house of an Irishman, William Davis, who had been transported for making pikes for the insurgents of 1798, venturing forth only at night to minister to the faithful. He said Mass in the house, reserving the Blessed Sacrament in a cedar press, guarded faithfully by the pious Davis family and their friends for more than two years, until the next priest arrived in the country. Davis later gave the house, and the garden about it, as a site on which to build St. Patrick's church. He was flogged twice and then imprisoned for refusing to attend the Protestant services. At his death, 17 August 1843, he was 78 years old.
The great Bishop John England, of Charleston, U. S. A., who was then a pastor and a leader in the struggle for Catholic Emancipation in Ireland, was among those who interested themselves in bringing the persecution of the Australian Catholics to the attention of the authorities in England, and so great was the indignation aroused that the Government was forced to make provision for two Catholic Chaplains to be sent to New South Wales. Fathers Philip Connolly, a native of Kildare, and John Joseph Thery, a native of Cork, at once volunteered and landed at Sydney, 4 May, 1820. Father Thery remained at Sydney and Father Connolly soon proceeded to Hobart, Tasmania, where he arrived in March, 1821, and dedicated his first humble chapel to the Irish Saint Virgilius. At Sydney Father Thery remained in charge until 1838 when he was transferred by Bishop Polding to be his representative and vicar-general in Tasmania. In 1832 there were from 16,000 to 18,000 Catholics in the colony of New South Wales, nearly all of them Irish of birth or descent. Dr. Ullathorne in a pamphlet, "The Catholic Mission in Australia", published in London in 1837, set down the number of transported persons then in the colonies at 53,000. He was largely instrumental in brining about a reform of the abuses of transportation and the prison system in the colonies, and during a visit to Ireland in 1839, secured several priests for the Australian mission.
In the work he did for the reform of the abuses in the penal colonies he says his great helper was an Irish priest, Father John McEneroe, one of the most notable men of the pioneer times, and for thirty-six years a leading figure in New South Wales. Born in Ardsalla, County Tipperary, 26 December, 1795, he was ordained at Maynooth in 1820 and held for a short time a professorship at the Meath Diocesan Seminary. Then at the invitation of Bishop England of Charleston, U. S. A., he went to America and laboured on the South Carolina missions with great zeal for seven years. Ill health forced him to return to Ireland in 1829. But the woes of the Catholics of Australia appealed so forcefully to him that he accepted the appointment of chaplain to the penal colony and arrived in Sydney in 1832. Until his death in August, 1868, he was without question one of the most influential promoters of the progress of the Church in Australasia. From the first his main energy was bent on the establishment of an Australian hierarchy. He sent a letter direct to the pope. "As in all new colonies", he tells the Holy Father, "so in this few subjects can be found for the priesthood for many years to come; a few priests may be procured from the Catholic countries of Europe, but it is from Ireland that they should naturally be provided for this mission, as ninety-five of every one hundred Catholics in all these colonies are Irish or of Irish descent."
Several years later the idea was carried out in part. In a visit of Bishop Goold to Rome in 1873, the question of nationality once more came up. "As regard the objection", he replied, "that the bishops of Australia are all Irish it appears to me to have no solid foundation to rest upon; on the contrary, any other course would be ridiculous. As a matter of fact the Catholic Europeans who form our congregations are, with very few exceptions, Irish. . . . It must be added that the purport of the aforesaid objection is to introduce English instead of Irish bishops to the Australian church, and hence the expediency of appointing Irish prelates becomes all the more apparent, for everyone is aware of the special antipathy of the Irish toward England" (Moran, "History of the Catholic Church in Australasia", 786, 787). Bishop Goold was born in Cork, 4 November, 1812, joined the Augustinians, and after his ordination in Italy, volunteered for the Australian mission. The list of the prelates of the Church in Australia shows the pope and his advisors in the main followed the lines indicated in what was said by Bishop Goold and Father MacEneroe.
Bishop Goold, from Irish foundations, introduced into the country the Jesuits, the Christian Brothers, the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, and the Presentation Nuns. At his invitation Fathers William Kelly and Joseph Lentaigne of the Irish Province had begun a foundation in Melbourne, 21 September, 1865. The Sisters of Charity of the Irish Congregation were the first to volunteer to serve the settlements in Botany Bay, and the community sent there by Mother Mary Aikenhead arrived at Port Jackson 31 December, 1838; one of this band was a novice, Mary Xavier Williams, born in Kilkenny, 12 July, 1800. She made her vows in Sydney in 1838, and was the first religious to have that privilege on Australian soil. She lived to be ninety-two, dying at Hobart, 8 March, 1892, the sole survivor of the pioneer community. The Sisters of Mercy, from Baggot Street, Dublin, next arrived, 7 January, 1846.
Mention has been made of the location of the Reverend Philip Connolly as the first priest in Tasmania, in March, 1821. Three years later, on 7 May, 1824, the Reverend Samuel Coote arrived from Dublin on a ship chartered by Roderick O'Connor, a brother of the Chartist leader Fergus O'Connor, to carry his family and a few other settlers to Van Dieman's Land. O'Connor was not then a Catholic but became one later, and was the donor of £10,000 to the Hobart cathedral building fund. It was here that Thomas Francis Meagher and the other political exiles of 1848 took up their residence. Father Connolly died 3 August, 1839. His old friend Father Thery, transferred from Sydney, carried on the work until after the appointment of Bishop Wilson to the see in 1842, when he retired. Bishop Wilson died on 30 June, 1866, and his successor was Bishop (later Archbishop) Daniel Murphy, a native of Cork, who presided in Rome at the funeral of the liberator, Daniel O'Connell, and lived to be a centenarian.
In South Australia the tone of public opinion in the early days was anti-Irish and anti-Catholic, and the growth of the Church was slow. The first bishop was the Reverend Francis Murphy, a native of the County Meath, who reached Adelaide in September, 1844. Thomas Mooney, an Irishman, was the first Catholic settler in Western Australia; but it was not until 1843 that Father John Brady, an Irish priest born at Cavan, and who for twelve years had laboured as a missionary in the Mauritius, was appointed to take charge of the district. In 1845 he was consecrated Bishop of Perth. For years he lived a life of apostolic poverty, tireless in his zeal as a missionary, and died in France, 3 December, 1871.
Father Thery was the first priest to visit the Queensland section, and the roll of his successors is an almost continuous list of Irish names. The Emigration Society in the early sixties of the last century directed many Irish families to Queensland. A Franciscan from Dublin, Reverend Patrick Bonaventure Geoghehan, was the first pastor in Victoria and celebrated the first Mass in Melbourne on 19 May, 1839. In May, 1841, the number of Catholics there was 2073, and on St. Patrick's Day, 1843, the St. Patrick's Society had a parade of 150 members.
An Irishman, Thomas Poynton, was the first Catholic settler of New Zealand, where he took charge of a store and sawing station in Hokianga, in 1828. He had married at Sydney the daughter of a Wexford Irishman, Thomas Kennedy. In the course of time a daughter was born to them, and the mother took the child to Sydney to be baptized, a distance of 1000 miles. The next child was a boy who was also taken to Sydney for baptism, but this time the ship went round by Hobart, and the distance was 2000 miles. Mr. Poynton himself made three visits to Sydney to try to get missionaries to devote themselves to the care of the New Zealand Catholics, and when the Marists and Bishop Pompalier finally did arrive there he was of much assistance to them. Among the settlers they ministered to was an Irishman named Cassidy who had married the daughter of a Maori chief.
In all this it can be seen how large a part Irishmen had in laying a foundation for the Church in Australia. The details of their association with secular affairs are equally prominent and honourable. They contributed their share and more than their share in building up responsible governments in the first four eastern States, and in the culminating federation of the great Commonwealth on 1 January 1901. In the development and solution of the important public issues of education, the tariff, vote by ballot, adult suffrage, the selection of land, agrarian legislation, the labour movement of 1873, Irish energy, executive ability, and political acumen contributed a large part. It is only necessary to mention as types such men as Sir Charles Gavan-Duffy, Sir John O'Shannessey, Nicholas Fitzgerald, Augustus Leo Kenny, James Coughlin, M. O'Grady, Daniel Brophy, Sir Patrick Buckley, John Curnin, and Morgan S. Grace (see also lists in the article Australia). In the delegates to the three great Australasian Catholic Conferences (the first at Sydney in September, 1900, the second at Melbourne in 1904, and the third at Sydney in September, 1909), the numerical strength and influence of the Irish in Australia was amply evidenced. The million Catholics that the estimates give for 1910 show without question that the early proportion of the Irish element is well maintained. Nor have they ever been forgetful of the land of their birth and their ancestors. In the famine years of the last century, contributions were sent back to help the sufferers. The Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society, founded in 1871, has many thousands of members, and has spread to every state of the Commonwealth and to New Zealand (see Australia).
The parish registers show that the Irish race was fairly well represented in New France, even in the early years of this colony. O'Farrell, in his "Irish Families in Ancient Quebec Records" (Montreal, 1872; 1908) asserts that of the 2600 families that made up the population of lower Canada at the close of the seventeenth century, wellnigh one hundred families were native of Ireland, and in about thirty other cases the husband or wife was of Irish birth. But these numbers would seem to be exaggerated. A careful study of Mgr Tanguay's "Dictionnaire généalogique" (7 volumes, Montreal, 1871), between 1625 and 1700, reveals thirty or forty names like Kelly, Casey, Murphy, Leahy, and others equally Celtic in sound. Mary Kerwin, the daughter of an Irish family who fled to France to preserve the Faith, came to Canada in 1643, and died a nun in the Hôtel-Dieu, Quebec, in 1687. Tanguay makes special mention of an Irishman, Teigue Cornelius O'Brennan, who married a French wife, Jeanne Chartier, at Quebec, in 1670. These two are the ancestors of the Aubrys and other families still prominent in the Province of Quebec.
The conflict on American soil between the armies of France and England, in the eighteenth century, brought many Irish soldiers to Canada. Some had been enlisted in the service of France; others had been taken prisoner by the French; others were deserters from the English ranks. The President of the Navy Board, at Paris, in a letter to the Canadian Intendants, de la Galissonnière and Hocquart, in 1748, wrote: "If the Irish Catholics, taken prisoners to Canada, ask to remain, the King of France sees no difficulty in their being allowed to do so. The manner in which the English treat their nation ought not to cause them to regret such a change." Desertion was a very common practice in the eighteenth century among the Irish soldiers who were pressed into the English armies, or whose misery at home obliged them to enlist. The author of "The Irish Brigades in the Service of France" gives instances of such desertions to the famous corps of their countrymen in France, where they might enjoy the exercise of their religion then interdicted in the British army, and, further, "that they might obtain in battle some of the vengeance then due for the many oppressions and insults so long inflicted on their creed and race." The Protestant Lord Primate of Ireland, in a letter from Dublin in 1730, to the Duke of Newcastle, wrote: "All recruits raised here are generally considered as persons who may, some time or other, pay a visit to this country as enemies. That those who are enlisted here . . . hope and wish to do so, there is no doubt." This spirit of retaliation will help to explain the presence of so many Irish deserters in Canada in the eighteenth century. They were so numerous, in fact, that they became a menace to British military efficiency in America. It was to the desertion of "Irish papists" that Sir William Johnson, Agent General of Indian Affairs, attributed the uneasiness existing among the Mohawks and other more westerly tribes who had remained loyal to the British. In a letter to the Lords of Trade, in London (28 May, 1756), he asked to be empowered to reward any Indians who would deliver up Irish soldiers who were living amongst them. Letters exist in the archives of the Marine, in Paris, giving Irish soldiers permission to remain in Canada, or to return to France, where they might join their countrymen in the Clare regiment. Many of them, however preferred to remain and settle in New France, where they would be safe from the law enforced by Britain, after the victory of Fontenoy, which stipulated that "Irish officers and soldiers, who had been in the service of France . . . should be disabled from holding any real or personal property, and the real or personal property should belong to the first Protestant discoverer".
The presence of a battalion of the Irish Brigade in Canada between 1755 and 1760 has always been a moot topic. In his "Documentary History", O'Calaghan gives a letter of Doreil, the French Commissary General, to Count D'Argeson, Minister of War, wherein he says that "agreeable to the wish of the Marquis de Vaudreuil, Governor of New France, several battalions of reinforcements should be sent to Canada and among them one Irish battalion", the reason given being that the Irish should be recruited from their fellow-countrymen already in Canada, or from deserters from the enemy. O'Farrell asserts that this battalion landed in Quebec on 26 June, 1755; but this is evidently an erroneous statement, for Doreil's appointment as Commissary General was dated only two months prior to the departure of the fleet, which he and de Vaudreuil accompanied to Canada. Three years later "a battalion of foreign volunteers" — possibly the Irish battalion suggested by Doreil — landed at Louisburg, where they met officers in the French service with such names as Admiral Macnamara, Captain de Carty, M. de Haggerty, and others, who were then operating on the Isle Royale. If, however, Irish soldiers were incorporated in the Béarn Regiment, as O'Callaghan supposes, they saw active service on four historic occasions: (1) on 8 September, 1755, under the leadership of the impetuous Dieskau, when the battalion suffered defeat in the attack on Fort Edward, but when Sir William Johnson, commanding three thousand men, did not dare follow up his victory; (2) in the capture of Fort Oswego from the English, August, 1756, by General de Montcalm, where, according to Houtenac, a French deserter to the English side, "the red faced with green", was conspicuous enough for special mention; (3) in August, 1757, in the surrender of Fort William Henry on Lake George, where de Levis defeated Munroe; (4) in the brilliant defeat of the British, 8 July, 1758, at Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain, in the important engagement known as the battle of Carillon. In this encounter the French troops, of which the Béarn Regiment formed a part, attacked Abercrombie's army of sixteen thousand, repelled seven successive charges, and killed or wounded four thousand of the enemy, with a loss to themselves of only thirty officers and three hundred and forty men. No documents, however, have come to light so far to prove the presence of an autonomous Irish corps in this campaign. The correspondence of de Vaudreuil shows that he did not take kindly to the employment of Irish prisoners taken from the English; he even sent a whole company back to France in 1757 to be incorporated in one of the brigades there. But there were certainly Irish soldiers to be found in the French ranks fighting against the historic enemy; the names of several Irish officers wounded at Carillon such as McCarthy, Floyd, Carlan etc., were sent by Montcalm to the governor after the victory had been gained. Carillon recalls the Celtic heroism displayed at Fontenoy, and this fact, together with the suggestion contained in the letter of the Commissary General, has led chroniclers to surmise the presence at Carillon of a battalion of the famous Irish brigade.
At the close of the war, many disbanded soldiers returned to Europe, while the rest settled in Canada. "The rest of the troops", writes de Levis, "having formed connections in the colony, resolved to remain there." Their long years of service among the French had made the Irish familiar with the language and customs of this people, and the gallicizing of their names, as we find them in the parish registers in the Province of Quebec, shielded the bearers from British retaliation. That retaliation was evidently intended was shown by the persistency with which General Jeffery Amherst, in 1760, refused to grant the articles of the capitulation dealing with the subjects of the King of England taken prisoner while in arms against him. However, owing to the precautions take by the Irish soldiers to identify themselves with the French Canadian peasantry, there is no record of reprisals. The Irish settled down in the Province of Quebec, and while retaining their names, or French variations of them, they were in a few years absorbed by the ambient race. The case of Dr. Timothy O'Sullivan is typical. He was the son of a lieutenant general in the army of James II, and had during sixteen years served as captain of dragoons among the Irish in Spain. In 1716 he started for Ireland to raise recruits for his regiment. During his voyage he was seized by pirates who landed him in New England. He escaped to Canada, settled down, and began to practice the profession of a surgeon. In 1720 he married the widow of M. Dufrost la Jemerais, whose eldest daughter, Madame d'Youville, became in after years the foundress of the Grey Nuns of Canada. O'Sullivan's French Canadian descendants are still to be found under the name of Sylvain. Other instances of assimilation of French and Irish in Canada are preserved for us in the archives of the Marine, in Paris. In 1714, an English ship, bound for Virginia with a score or two of young Irishwomen on board was seized on the Atlantic by a French vessel, "L'Heureux". The passengers were brought to Quebec and distributed among different private families, where their racial identity was soon lost, as nothing more is heard of them. The pathetic case is cited in the same documents of Cullen, or Collins, an Irish soldier who, after the fall of Oswego, in 1756, was seen with his wife and children drifting in an open boat over Lake Ontario on his way to some French settlement. Historic facts like these go to prove that a larger percentage of Irish blood flowed in the veins of the French Canadian population at the end of the eighteenth century than is generally suspected.
There are few traces of systematized Irish immigration to Canada until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The supremacy of the King of England in matters ecclesiastical, so persistently insisted upon during the first years of the English domination, and the evident desire to crush out the Catholic Church, shown so plainly in the "Royal Instruction to Governors" were not of a nature to encourage immigration of Catholics, especially of Irish Catholics, who had suffered so long under unjust laws in their own land. These "Instructions" forbade under severe penalties all appeals to, or correspondence with, any foreign ecclesiastical jurisdiction "of whatever nature or kind whatsoever". No episcopal or vicarial power could be exercised by any person professing the religion of the Church of Rome, but only such as was essentially and indispensable necessary to the free exercise of the Romish religion. A parish priest could not be appointed in a place where Protestants were in the majority. In such parishes the Protestant incumbent should have all the tithes, but the Catholics might have use of the church. In places were Catholics were in a majority, a parish priest might be appointed, but the tithes of the Protestants should be held in reserve for the support of the Protestant clergy. Section 8 of article 43 of the Instructions shows the sentiments which animated the British government in those years. "All ecclesiasticks as may think fit to enter into the holy state of matrimony shall be released from all penalties to which they might have been subjected in such cases by any authority of the See of Rome." Naturally the Irish would shun a colony where such laws were in force, and where even the French Catholic colonists did not know what their destiny was to be; but one of the first British governors, Sir Guy Carleton — a humane and tactful Irishman, born in Tyrone, who declared later that if lower Canada had been preserved to Great Britain, it was owing to the Catholic clergy — did much in his correspondence with the home Government to mitigate the rigour of the obnoxious "Instructions" and to reconcile the Canadians to their new masters. It was the same Carleton, afterwards Lord Dorchester, who, in 1775, successfully defended Quebec, during the American siege, during which General Montgomery, also an Irishman, lost his life.
Succeeding governors of Canada, especially Haldiman and Craig, were less accommodating to Catholics than Carleton, and it was not till the diplomatic and uncompromising Bishop Plessis, one of the illustrious figures in Canadian history, took up the struggle for the liberties of the Church that Catholics began to breathe freely. This prelate succeeded in having the rights of the Church recognized, and left the way open for the immigration to Canada of Catholics of every nationality. When he visited the Upper St. Lawrence, on a pastoral tour, in 1816, he found seventy-five Catholic families in the neighbourhood of Kingston, among them twenty Scotch and Irish, and others as far west as Niagara. Ferland tells us that during the summer of 1820 over thirty families arrived at Quebec from Ireland. They had hoped to better their condition by emigrating, but owing to the unsettled condition of the country and the stagnation of business, they failed miserably. These poor exiles were in the direst poverty, and as winter was approaching, the noble-hearted Bishop Plessis wrote a touching letter to his parish priests in their favour. Meanwhile groups of Irish colonists had begun to arrive and settle in Upper Canada and in the Maritime provinces. In 1803 a Talbot of Malahide, moved by the desire to control the "Paradise of the Hurons" he had read about in Charlevoix, secured six hundred and eighty thousand acres in Western Ontario and gradually opened up this vast district to settlement. Talbot was one of the first to draw his countrymen to that province. In 1825 Peter Robinson began to work on similar lines north of Lake Ontario. He brought two thousand colonists and located them along the banks of the Otanabee, in the neighbourhood of Peterboro. Other groups continued to arrive from time to time to strengthen the Irish element; between 1830 and 1860 two hundred thousand settled in Ontario; and in several counties the Irish still predominate. The Nova Scotia Archives show that Irish settlers were numerous in this province, many of whom were undoubtedly disbanded soldiers of the Cornwallis Regiment. Shortly after the treaty of 1763, Irish Presbyterians settled in Windsor, Truro, Londonderry, and other inland points, where their descendants may still be found. Although the intolerant laws of England were still in force against Catholics, the provincial governors showed themselves more or less conciliatory to the proscribed religion, and Irish Catholic colonists continued to increase in numbers. The appointment of a Vicar Apostolic for Nova Scotia, in 1818, proves that they were already numerous enough to require episcopal care. Bishop Plessis has left us some edifying pages in his "Journal" on the Catholicity of the Irish colony in Halifax in 1815, and the warm reception he met with from the Irish during his tour along the coast of Nova Scotia.
New Brunswick was separated from Nova Scotia in 1784, when the United Empire Loyalists, among whom were a few Protestant Irish, began to arrive. The records of this Province reveal the presence of Irish Catholics even in the early years of the nineteenth century. The Bishop of Quebec found about twenty families at St. John in 1815, and he named St. Malachy as titulary of the small church they were completing there. Immigration to New Brunswick did not start in earnest until after 1830, when the Irish began to carve out homes for themselves along the beautiful St. John River and the shores of the Bay of Fundy, where their descendants are now prosperous. Prince Edward Island, or Isle St-Jean, as it was originally called, was ceded to Great Britain and made a separate province in 1769. It was first settled by the French, but in 1772 MacDonald of Glenaladale brought his hardy Scottish Highlanders over and they took up large tracts of land there. A few Irish, from Ireland and Newfoundland, also settled in Charlottetown during the closing years of that century. According to the Abbé de Calonne, a French missionary working among them, they had neither social nor political influence. This was natural and yet, were it not for the veto of the British authorities, the first Governor, Patterson, would have changed the name of the Island from Isle St-Jean to New Ireland. Irish Catholics continued to arrive every year in groups and singly, and settled on farms and in the growing centres of population. Some of the most distinguished names in the history of Prince Edward Island are found among the descendants of those early Irish settlers. Manitoba and Northwest Territories were then, and for many years later, an unknown land as far as the Irish were concerned.
Emigration from Ireland to Canada continued in earnest from 1820 to 1850. Davin asserts that in the two years following 1832 over eighty thousand Irish landed on Canadian soil, and proportionate numbers continued to arrive every season in sailing vessels, wooden tubs most of them that had been used in the Canadian lumber trade. According to the report of the Agents for Emigrants, in the ten years ending in 1836, 164,338 Irish landed in Quebec, "a convenient stopping-place on the way to the Far West". Thousands, however, made their homes in Lower Canada. A writer in the "Dublin Review" (Oct., 1837), asserts that even then the Irish were an influential body in Quebec and Montreal, and that in the troubles leading up to the Insurrection of 1837 they threw their influence with the French Canadians and the House of Assembly against the oligarchy that were trying to withhold responsible government.
The cholera epidemic of 1832 wrought havoc among the Irish as well as the French, but the year 1847 will always stand out in the history of the race in Canada. In the summer of that year, 100,000 men, women, and children, fleeing from famine and death in Ireland, "were stricken with fever and were lying helpless in the riverports and seaports of Canada". Thousands of these unhappy people died and found only graves where they had hoped to find peace and plenty. Rarely in the annals of a civilized nation have such scenes been witnessed as those enacted, during the eventful summer of 1847, among the fever-stricken Irish in all the quarantine stations along the St. Lawrence and in other points in Canada. Numerous heroic priests and nuns faced death to bring the consolation of religion to these affected people who, conscious of past wrongs, and forced to abandoned their beloved homeland, were yet confident of success in their fight for existence, if only the chance were given them, but who found themselves, on the threshold of their new home, facing a struggle with disease and death. The official figures tell us that in 1847 four thousand one hundred and ninety-two died at sea, four thousand five hundred and seventy-nine on Grosse Isle, seven hundred and twelve at Quebec, five thousand three hundred and thirty at Montreal, seventy-one at St. John, N. B., one hundred and thirty at Lacine, eight hundred and sixty three in Toronto, three hundred and forty-eight at other places in Ontario; but, owing to the circumstances of the time, and the difficulty in getting accurate statistics, these figures are hardly reliable. Other and more trustworthy reports declare the number dead and buried on Grosse Isle alone exceeding ten thousand, while Dr. Douglas, a medical superintendent at the time, estimated that at least eight thousand had been buried at sea. The survivors of the famine years — the few who still survive — recall with tears the memory of those score witnessed in their early childhood; and yet what seemed an irreparable disaster only proved, as in so many other instances in the history of the Irish race, to be a triumph of their Faith, and history has not failed to record it. The Irish, in 1847, brought their traditions with them across the Atlantic, and in those moments of direst sorrow and misery it was their religion which buoyed them up. It will forever be to their glory that, far from yielding to despair at the sacrifices demanded, they accepted their sad fate with sublime resignation, and went to their death blessing the Hand that smote them. A Celtic cross, fitting symbol of Erin and her undying faith, was raised during the summer of 1909, on Grosse Isle, by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, to recall the fever years and the heroism of those that assisted them.
The holocaust of 1847 threw thousands of Irish children on the charity of the public. Those of them who were without friends and relatives were adopted by French Canadians, and were, with all tenderness and sympathy, reared to manhood and womanhood. They learned the language of their foster parents, and, as their forebears, the Irish soldiers of the eighteenth century had done, they married into French families and became identified with the French, very often revealing their origin only in their Celtic names. Their Celtic blood, however, with its concomitant gifts of mind and heart, generously infused into the dominant French race, proved a rare asset to this older people living along the banks of the St. Lawrence, and was the noblest requital the Irish could make for the whole-heated hospitality given to them in 1847.
However, accidents of ethnic absorption, such as occurred in Canada among the French and Irish in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were the results of exceptional conditions and are not likely to occur again. The Irish in Canada have grown in numbers and in influence in the last half-century, and will be able to shoulder their future burdens alone. The following figures furnished by the Dominion Census Bureau are official, and show the trend of the Irish element, Catholic and non-Catholic, in Canada between the years 1871 and 1901, when the last census was taken. The fluctuation of population showed in several of the provinces was not confined to the Irish alone, and was the indirect result of commercial stagnation consequent on the Confederation Act of 1867.
These figures show an increase in thirty years of 142,307. In 1871 there were still 219, 451 persons who had been born in Ireland; in 1901 there were only 101, 629, marking a decrease, owing to death or emigration from Canada, of 117,822, in the foreign-born Irish population. As the emigration from Ireland in those thirty years was inappreciable, the approximate figures of the native-born Irish Canadian population between 1871 and 1901 was 142, 307 + 117,822 = 260,129. This shows that what the Irish element lost on Quebec and in the Maritime provinces during the period named, it gained in Ontario and the West. Owing to the strides which Canada is making in development, the census of 1911 will undoubtedly show an increase in the Irish population far greater than that of 1901.
British Columbia: 1871: ? — 1901: 20,658
Manitoba: 1871: ? — 1901: 47,418
New Brunswick: 1871: 100,643 — 1901: 83,384
Nova Scotia: 1871: 62,851 — 1901: 54,710
Ontario: 1871: 559,442 — 1901: 624,332
Prince Edward Island: 1871: ? — 1901: 21,992
Quebec: 1871: 123,478 — 1901: 114,842
North-West Territories: 1871: ? — 1901: 18,797
Unorganized Territory: 1871: ? — 1901: 2,588
Total: 1871: 846,414 — 1901: 988,721
The Irish Catholics in Canada, who now number about three-quarters of a million, are fully organized both socially and religiously. They have their churches, schools, convents, colleges, orphanages, etc., many of them imposing-looking institutions. They have their bishops, priests, and their charity and teaching orders of both sexes. They have their fraternal societies of all kinds. They have their writers and their ably edited newspapers. They are represented in every avenue of public life. In commerce and industry they are contributing their share to the wealth of the Canadian nation. Some of the most eminent members of the legal and medical profession in Canada, during the last fifty years, have been, and still are, Irish Catholics; several of them have been knighted for eminence in their respective callings. The Irish have had their governors of provinces, cabinet ministers, senators, members of both Federal and Provincial Parliaments, and they are still well-represented in these functions in the government of the country. Thomas d'Arcy McGee asserted forty years ago that, since 1792, lower Canada was never without an Irishman in its legislative councils. This tradition is kept up not merely in old Quebec, but in the sister provinces, and in the Federal Parliament at Ottawa. An Irish Catholic is (1910) Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and Deputy Governor-General of the Dominion.
Mr. Joseph Cowen has called the Ireland of the sixth century the "Christian Greece". Irish monks from Iona repeated in England their work in Alba. Irish soldiers helped Athalstan to victory in 937. Early in the eleventh century Irish merchants were trading with Bristol. There, in 1247, died O'Murray, Bishop of Kilmacdaugh. In the same year Irish students resided at Oxford, where, said Newman, "there was from the earliest times, even a street called 'Irishman's Street'". Later a Bishop of Meath died at Oxford. A native of Dundalk, Fits-Ralph, was Chancellor of Oxford in 1333. While the Gaelic-Irish followed the fortunes of Wallace and of Bruce, the Norman-Irish fought for the English against Scotland. Thence for four hundred years the Irish helped England in her continental wars.
Up to the middle of the sixteenth century there was no Irish colony in Great Britain. Leland, in 1545, wrote of Liverpool: "Irish merchants come much thither as to a good haven . . . Good merchants at Lyrpole and moch Yrish yarn, that Manchester men do buy there." Irish music had also found favour in England. The Earl of Worcester, writing in 1602, to the Earl of Shrewsbury, said: "Irish tunes are this time most pleasing". Pistol's "Callino custore me" (Henry V, Act IV, sc. 4) has been explained as Colleen oge astore (young girl, my treasure). From some dialect in the plays of this period, Knight things that the costermongers were largely Irish. Among the martyrs of Elizabeth's reign were some Irish-born. James I severely penalized in Ireland his mother's religion. A Catholic landowner was prohibited from appointing a guardian for his heir, who, through the Court of Wards, was brought up by Protestant noblemen. Early in his reign there were three hundred of such children in the Tower of London, and at Lamberth schools. After the Act of Settlement two-thirds of the fertile land passed into Protestant hands. In 1651, Hewson, Governor of Dublin, reported that, "in Dublin, which formerly swarmed with Papists, he knew there now but one, a surgeon and a sensible man". Referring to 1699, Lord Clare (speech on the Union) declared: "so that the whole of your island has been confiscated, with the exception of the estates of five or six families." — "Such of the Roman Catholic gentry as had retained their estates were stripped or all political and many civil rights, and were left virtually at the mercy of a Protestant enemy" (Bryce). To provide for the education of emigrating sons consequent to this state of things, Irish colleges were founded in several parts of the continent. Thence they joined the armies and political life of the nations in which they were educated, some reaching high positions as officers and statesmen. Thus the idea of emigration was created.
In Charles I's reign ambassadors of foreign powers only were allowed in England to have Catholic chapels. It was in this way that around the Sardinian Chapel in Lincoln's Inn Fields gathered the first considerable Irish colony in London. By 1666, the year of the great fire, a considerable importation of cattle from Ireland to England was going on. To relieve the distress in London a gift of 15,000 bullocks was sent over from Ireland. Ludovic Barry, the first Irish dramatist to write in English, Sir James Ware, the antiquarian McFerbis, the last of the Irish annalists, Denham, Roscommon, and Flecknoe, poets, Cherry, actor and poet, Arthur Murphy, lawyer, dramatists, and editor, and Barry, the painter, were Catholics among the many Irishmen, eminent in science, art, and literature, living in England during the eighteenth century. The comparative fewness of Catholics is explained by the fact that penal laws made learning a crime. "the avowed policy of the [English] Cabinet was to discourage the teaching of the Irish 'better orders' in Ireland. . . . They passed out of the country's ken and became aliens" (Bridges). The difficulty of recruiting sufficient men for the British Army and Navy; the investment abroad of money by Irish Catholics (it being illegal to invest it in Irish land), money which Protestant land owners could have profitably used, the success of the American War of Independence, and possibly ideas of liberty and toleration caught from the French Revolution, made for some relaxation of the penal code. The first Relief Bill came to England in 1778 when there were about 60,000 Catholics there, of whom from 6000 to 8000 were Irish, mostly resident in London. An Irish Relief Bill did not follow until 1793. During the eighteenth century there was a considerable trade between Whithaven and Ulster. The Catholic mission to St. Begh, Whithaven, dates from 1706. Hawkers and traders at this time were frequently passing through London for the Kent hop-pickings. At Croiden Assize, 1767, an Irish priest, Moloney, was condemned to perpetual imprisonment for exercising his functions. At St. Mary's Old Chapel, Lumber St., Liverpool, an Irish priest, Anthony Carroll, served from 1759 to 1766. Another Irish priest, Fr. P. O'Brien, was there from 1760 to 1770. The mission of St. George's Cathedral, Southwark, dates from 1766, when an Irish priest, Father T. Walsh, hired a room in which to say Mass. In condemning the Gordon riots (1780), Burke "supposed" there were not less than 4000 Catholics in London. Manning gave the Catholic population of England in 1788 at 69,000. The famous Irishman, Father Arthur O'Leary, founded St. Patrick's, Soho, in 1792. Froude, writing in 1798, said "Half the sailors and petty officers in the service were Catholics" and inferred that they were mostly Irish.
Consequent upon the removal of the seat of government at the Union, there was less inducement for men of political instincts, social ambitions, or intellectual activities, to remain in Ireland. Before the County and District Councils of 1898 there were neither local or national self-government to attract the first; the absenteeism of richer men baffled the second; dearth of general higher education and learned distinction was felt by the third. Ireland lost the creative power of a native aristocracy, intellectual, financial, or social. Hence her gentry were induced, more and more, to ally themselves to England. But this exile was not of the nobility only. In 1803 a report of a secret Commission of the House of Commons described London and other large English towns as honeycombed with secret societies in communication with the disaffected elements in Ireland. This closing of avenues of distinction; the restriction of industry and trade arising from the Penal Laws, the famines of 1817 and 1822, impelled an increasing immigration, which the famine of 1846-48. the "Black 47", made a permanent factor in national life. Emigration from May, 1851, to 31 December, 1908, drained away 4,126,310 souls or half the national population. In 1846, with only 65 miles of railways, Ireland had a population of 300 to the square mile. "Nearly half as many again as the purely agricultural districts of England support at the present time (1908) and twice as many as Denmark, the model farming country of Europe." In 1901 there were 141 per square mile. The bulk of the Irish emigrants were, naturally, poor. Those who came to the nearest lands, England and Scotland, were the poorest of the poor, being those who had not the means to reach far Australia, or nearer America, or Canada. For years, therefore, they could not make any impression, social or political, on their adopted countries. The influence was simply that of example in fidelity to their religion. Untouched by the spirit of irreligion or indifference rife on the Continent, this example was particularly vivid. Mayhew in his "London Labour" praises the virtue of the London-Irish coster girls and lads. Illicit connections were, he says, the exception rather than the rule among them. Partly from these immigrants, partly for them, a large body of Irish priesthood accumulated in both countries, who, with signal self-sacrifice, devoted themselves to the humblest and most trying duties of their ministry. Educated men, in many cases highly gifted, lived outwardly inglorious lives in surroundings of the squalor, ignorance, and vice that seems inevitable in cities of our civilization. The examples of strenuous faith, of fearless Catholicism, of active piety, which this large body of men must have impressed upon their English and Scots coreligionists, unquestionably deepened and widened the hold and growth of Catholicism in these islands. They were, it has been well said, the most successful missionaries of the Catholic church in the nineteenth century. Railway development, the rise of manufacturing towns and of commercial cities, were powerful attractions to the Irish poor. Curiously enough, scarcely any of these immigrants from an agricultural country settled in agricultural districts.
Politically, the Irish in England scarcely emerged, from non-recognition under O'Connell's appeal to moral force in his agitation for Repeal. Their political awakening was not even complete under the call of Young Ireland to a more active force. Signs of life were visible upon a return to the methods of the United Irish of 1898, attempted by the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood (Fenianism) of 1859 — open physical force cemented by an oath of secrecy. A large number of the labouring Irish were pronouncedly in favour of this. They and their middle-class fellow countrymen grew to political importance when they reverted to the idea of moral force only, advanced by Isaac Butt in his home rule scheme of 1870 — an idea broadly, but less pacifically, followed by Parnell. It is significant of this increase of political power of the Irish in England that it was the Liverpool convention of the Home Rule Confederation that superseded Butt with Parnell. Concurrent with it was the Irish National Land League originated by Michael Davitt, who, as a former worker in the cotton miles of Lancashire, was very popular with the Irish workers in England. In the United Irish League in Great Britain, the two facets of the Irish party have a most powerful organization, with ramifications everywhere.
From its situation Liverpool would have a large poor Irish population. From 1788-89 there were 260 Catholic baptisms out of 2332, i.e., 111/4 percent. Approximately, the Catholic population of Liverpool in 1788 was 6916; in 1811, 21,359; in 1829, 50,000. (In 1804 there were only 12,000 to 15,000 Catholics in London.) In 1841, the Irish-born in Great Britain numbered 419, 256; in 1851, there were 519,595, of whom 213,907 were in Scotland. It has been claimed that "the outward sign of the great impetus given to Catholicism in Great Britain by the immigration from Ireland was the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England". It was therefore appropriate that the first head of the restored hierarchy should be a son of Irish parents. The present Archbishop of Westminster is of Irish descent, as is also his bishop auxiliary and vicar-general and one of his canons. In 1853 Irish Vincentians took charge of the parish of St. Vincent, Sheffield. Later they had a training college at Hammersmith. At present the Irish province has two houses in England. In this year there were 41,400 Catholics mostly Irish, in the British Army, and a quarter of the Navy was estimated as Irish Catholics. In 1862 the Irish Sisters of Charity were working in Hereford. In 1881 the census of the Parliament Burough of Manchester gives 83/8 percent of its population as Irish (32,750 out of 393,580). In 1908 the Catholic population of Great Britain was 2,130,100, of which 400,000 was in Scotland. In 1909 the Catholic population of England had increased to 1,671,000, with one of its bishops Irish-born and two others of Irish descent. Irish Sisters of Charity are in the Diocese of Westminster and of Shrewsbury, and Irish Christian Brothers are at Bristol. Confessions are officially announced as heard in Irish in the Diocese of Westminster (2 churches), Clifton and Salford (4 churches). Of the 1717 churches, chapels, and stations in England, 48 (23/4 percent) are dedicated to Irish saints, of which 42 are under St. Patrick.
Though the impress of the early Catholic Irish settlers on the social, political, and artistic life of England was absolutely nil, the influence of the Irish-born or Irish descendants of today is important. Of such in the Church are one archbishops and four bishops (and titulars), two abbots, a prior, two rectors of colleges, two provincials, an administrator of a cathedral, the preacher of the "Papal Sermon" at the Vatican Council, several domestic prelates and numerous canons. In the State: a Groom, and also a Lord, in waiting to the king, Somerset Herald, twenty-four army officers, five M. P.'s, three in the Civil Service, two County-Court judges, seven J. P.'s, four Aldermen, two superintendents of Scotland Yard. Referring only to those admitted position, there are, in science, three; in art, a portrait painter, two other artists; one musician, five actors and actresses; two singers in opera. In medicine, a king's physician, and thirteen eminent practitioners. In letters, the founder and first editor of "The Windsor Magazine"; editors of five other newspapers, etc.; forty-four writers, novelists, authors; nine journalists; and many members of educational, and of county, councils.
Assuming the bulk of Irish residents in England are Catholic, the following statistics have interest. (The latest census returns are made up to 1901.) Irish-born inhabitants of England and Wales: 426,565, or 13.1 per 1000 of the whole population of England and Wales and 96 per 1000 of the population of Ireland; a decrease of 7 percent in England and Wales since 1891.
The percentages of Irish-born to the whole population of England and Wales were 2.9 in 1851; 2.1 in 1861; 2.5 in 1871; 2.15 in 1881; 1.8 in 1891; 1.3 in 1901.
The earliest authentic record of emigration from Ireland to Scotland is to Argyle, about the year 258 — fighting men who helped kindred tribes in Alba against Roman invaders. The See of the Isles is said to have been founded by St. Patrick about 447. Irish missionaries followed. In 503 Prince Fergus left Ireland to help the Scots of Alba against the Picts. His colony became the basis of a kingdom. In 565 St. Columba of Donegal passed into Scotland, labouring in Iona for thirty-five years. His celebrated declaration against Scots paying tribute to Irish kings practically established the Scottish nation. The Scots of former times recognized their debt by frequent use of the baptismal name Malcolm, i.e., "Servant of Columba". By the ninth century, the Scots were politically a distinct people, though the hierarchy of Northern Ireland kept an ecclesiastical protectorate over Iona as late as 1203. Intercourse between Ireland and Scotland in the thirteenth century is seen in the election of Donnel Oge to chieftainship (1258); who, having lived in Scotland, spoke in Albanian Gaelic. In 1498 Hugh Roe O'Donnell visited James VI in Scotland, concluding with him an offensive and defensive covenant. Through harpers and pipers Irish music penetrated into Scotland. Hardiman says: "The air, as well as the words of Maggy Laidir . . . is Irish." Robin Adair is the Irish "Aileen Aroon"; "John Anderson, my Jo" is at least an echo of "Cruiskeen Lawn".
The General Assembly of 1608 proposed to James "that the sons of noblemen professing popery should be committed to the custody of their friends as are sound in religion", which was effectively done. In 1785 "Irish fishermen were brought from Ireland to teach the natives of Uist the manufacture of kelp from seaweed. Others were brought to the Shetlands because of their dexterity in fishing. . . . The inhabitants of Barra learned fishing from the Irish fishermen."
When Betoun, the last archbishop of the ancient Scottish hierarchy went into exile (1560), English archpriests had jurisdiction over Scotland. On his death, in 1603, the hierarchy came to an end. In 1623 Gregory XV established a prefect of missions for Scotland. In 1631 the Irish Bishop of Down and Conor, Magennis, was put over the Scottish mission by Urban VIII. The second in succession from him was an Irish Franciscan, Patrick Hogarty (1640). In 1651, two Irish Vincentians, Fathers Dugan and White, went as missionaries to Scotland. The former worked for six years in the Hebrides, being very successful in Uist and Barra. In this latter place legends still exist of the curious miracles said to have been worked by him. Father White gave seventeen years to the Eastern highlands. In 1718 there were about forty Catholics in Glasgow. In 1779 Scotland had one bishop and some 17,000 Catholics. In 1793 the first Relief Bill for Catholics was passed.
In 1800 there were three bishops, forty priests, twelve churches, and about thirty thousand Catholics. In 1804 the Scotch had the free exercise of their religion. St. Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, dates from 1814; St. Andrew's Glasgow, from 1816. Glasgow, the city of St. Mungow (the Irish St. Kentigurn), ground hallowed by the footsteps of St. Columba, in the early part of this century doubled its population in twenty years, largely caused by immigration from Ireland, a Scottish writer says. In 1829 there were 70,000 Catholics in Scotland, of whom 20,000 were in Glasgow. In 1851 Glasgow had 80,000 Catholics of whom 62,925 were Irish. In the same year, 11.34 per cent of the population of Paisley were Irish. In 1854, an Irish Vincentian, Father J. Meyers, had charge of St. Mary's Lanark. Five years later the Irish province established a house at Lanark. They have still a house in Scotland. In 1860, the Irish Catholics of Glasgow, with their priests, were much dissatisfied with the manner in which ecclesiastical patronage was distributed. Much antagonism between the Irish and Scotch Catholics ensued. The vicar of the Western District, Murdock, carried the matter to Rome, and after an energetic struggle, won; shortly after he died (1866), and his successor, Grey, received an Irish Vincentian, Fr. J. Lynch, as coadjutor. Schism threatening, Grey resigned, and Lynch was transferred to Limerick. Mgr. Eyre, promoted Apostolic delegate, succeeded to the Western Vicariate, and at last secured peace. It was during this turmoil that the Irish party first raised a cry for the restoration of the hierarchy, which had been suppressed in 1603. In 1864 Cardinal Wiseman advised Propaganda in favour of this restoration. Among other reasons he stated that the overwhelming majority of Catholics in the great commercial and manufacturing towns were poor Irish. In four years, ending in 1835, the number of Catholics in Edinburgh had risen from 700 to 8000, and in Glasgow, from 50 to 24,000. Nothing came of it until 1877, when the question was examined. In the following March (1978), Leo XIII, by the Bull "Ex Supreme", restored the hierarchy in Scotland. In 1874 there were 360,000 Irish in Scotland. Today there are 518,969, of whom 380,000 are in Glasgow. Macintosh, a non-Catholic authority, says "The Roman Catholics have in recent years relatively increased more than any other denomination."
Of the 398 Catholic churches, chapels, and stations in Scotland, 36, or 9.7 per cent, are dedicated to Irish saints. Of these, 12 are under the name of St. Patrick. Of the 13 priests ordained in Scotland in 1909 there were three Irish-born and one Irish descent. One of Scotland's two archbishops is of Irish descent. The Irish political movements noted in England apply, mutatis mutandis, to Scotland; but the social and artistic impress of Irishmen is less marked there than in England. By a papal decree of 15 December, 1909, the Ancient Order of Hibernians in Scotland is now tolerated.
The Catholics of South Africa are for the most part Irish or of Irish descent. They do not form a large proportion of the general population, for the tide of Irish emigration has set chiefly toward America and Australia. Leaving out of account the mission stations founded for work among the native population, it may be said that the distribution of the Catholic churches throughout South Africa roughly indicates the chief centres where Irishmen are found, and the growth of Catholic organization in South African colonies has run on parallel lines with the increase of the Irish Catholic population. When Bishop Ullathorne touched at Cape Town in 1832 on way to Australia, he found there "but one priest for the whole of South Africa". The statistics for 1909 show that for that year there were 298 priests and 1929 religious, men and women. Repeated attempts to gain a footing for Catholicism in South Africa had ended in a dismal failure. But in 1837 a new era began when the Holy See separated the South African colonies from the Vicariate Apostolic of the Maritius and sent as Vicar Apostolic to Cape Town an Irish Dominican, the Rt. Rev. Patrick. R. Griffith. Bishop Griffith's successors in Cape Town to the present day have all been Irishmen (Thomas Grimley, consecrated 1861; John Leonard, 1872; and John Rooney, 1886), and most of the churches in Cape Colony have been founded by Irish priests. Irishmen form about 90 per cent of the Catholic population of the colony.
In 1847 Pius IX divided South Africa into the Western Vicariate (Cape Town and district) and the Eastern Vicariate (Eastern Cape Colony, Natal, etc.). Natal was erected into a separate vicariate three years later. After the rush to the diamond fields had brought many Irish Catholics into the district, Kimberley was erected into a vicariate in 1886 and now includes the Orange River Colony. There were very few Catholics in the Transvaal until the opening out of the Rand gold field brought a rush of Irish immigrants to what is now Johannesburg. Until 1885 the handful of Catholics in the Republic were attached to the Natal vicariate. The Transvaal was then made a prefecture Apostolic. It was erected into a separate vicariate in 1904, when an Irish prelate, the Rt. Rev. W. Miller, O. M. I., was consecrated as its first bishop. Rhodesia is a prefecture Apostolic which has grown out of the Zambesi mission, founded by the Jesuits before the coming of the pioneers of the South African Company brought with it an influx of white settlers. Basutoland is another prefecture, but there is a very limited white population, the Basutos having preserved a semi-independence under the supervision of a British "Resident". The Vicariate Apostolic of the Orange River, erected in 1901, is another district which has a scattered white population, living in a thinly peopled country, where the mission stations have mainly to do the work for the natives. It includes the northwest and part of the centre of Cape Colony, its northern boundary being the lower course of the Orange River. It is interesting to note that the Church obtained its first foothold in this district in 1873, when the Cape Government handed over to Catholic missionaries a mission station in Namaqualand, which had been abandoned by the Protestant Rhenish Society during the Bushman insurrection.
The census of Cape Colony, 1904, states the total population as 2,409,804, of whom 549,741 were whites. The religious census gives the total Catholic population as 37,000 of whom 28,480 were whites. This latter figure includes Catholic soldiers in garrison. Taking 90 per cent as the proportion of Irish Catholics, the total for the two Vicariates (Eastern and Western) would be about 25,000. A large proportion of the priests and religious are Irish, and it has already been mentioned that the Vicar Apostolic of Cape Town is an Irish prelate. So is the Vicar Apostolic of the Eastern District at Port Elizabeth, the Rt. Rev. Hugh McSherry, who was consecrated at Dundalk, in 1896, by Cardinal Logue, primate of all Ireland.
The chief centres of Irish population in the colony are Cape Town and the adjacent townships, and Port Elizabeth, East London, and the adjoining districts. Very few Irish Catholics are resident outside these towns or engaged in farming. There are more than thirty convents in the colony, each the centre of various active good works. The oldest of these convents in South Africa is that of Our Lady of Good Hope, Grahamstown, founded by Irish nuns in 1849. Another instance of Irish pioneer work may be noted — the oldest Church in Grahamstown, St. Patrick's, opened in 1844, was largely built by the voluntary labour of Irish soldiers. There are convents of the Sisters of Nazareth at Cape Town, supported by the offerings of men of all religious denominations. There is a special mission to the leper colony, isolated on Robben Island. Other institutions and charitable works are orphanages, deaf and dumb institutions, and nursing homes. The chief organizations among the Irish Catholics are confraternities established in most of the churches. The St. Vincent de Paul Society is almost exclusively officered by Irishmen. Many of the Catholic schools of the colony receive government aid. The high schools, the most important of which is the Jesuit college at Grahamstown, send up their pupils for the degrees of the University of Cape Town, which is an examining, not a teaching, body. There are about three hundred conversions annually among the white non-Catholic population. The Natal Vicariate includes Natal, Zululand, and the Transkei district of Cape Colony. The priests are mostly French missionaries (Oblates of Mary), but there are some Irish members of the Order, and about one-third of the nuns are Irish. There is a large coloured Catholic population (Africans and Tamil immigrants from India), some 20,000 in all. The ecclesiastical returns up to mid-summer, 1909, fix the white Catholic population at 7458. This includes troops in garrison. The permanent Irish Catholic population (colonists) is estimated at about 3000. They are found chiefly in Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Ladysmith, and the Transkei. Catholic organization is on the same general lines as in Cape Colony. The parochial elementary schools and some of the secondary schools receive government aid.
The Kimberley Vicariate, with its centre in the Diamond City, includes the Orange River Colony, Bechuanaland, and the greater part of Griqualand, an extent of about 200,000 square miles. The Catholics do not number quite 5000. There are some 1500 in Kimberley; about 95 per cent of them are Irish by birth or descent. Scattered in small groups through Bechuanaland and Griqualand there are about 360, nearly all of Irish blood. There are some 2000 in the Orange River Colony, of whom about 80 percent are Irish. The total Irish Catholic population may be taken at between three and four thousand. The vicar Apostolic, the Rt. Rev. Matthew Gaughren, is an Irishman, as was his predecessor. There are only nineteen priests to serve this huge district. Eight are Irish. There are nearly a hundred nuns, of whom half are Irish women. The Sisters of Nazareth have a house at Kimberley and other orders conduct schools for girls at Kimberley, Bloemfontein, Vryburg, Beaconsfield, Kroonstad, and Mafeking. "Our Catholic schools" writes the vicar Apostolic, "are absolutely independent of the Government school system. They are not subject to inspection and they receive no grants. The public school system finds no place for denominational schools, but there is no actual hostility against them.
In the Transvaal vicariate there are some 12,000 Irish Catholics under an Irish Archbishop, the Rt. Rev. William Miller, O. M. I. They are chiefly found in and about Johannesburg. Many of them are Irish Americans, some of whom hold prominent positions in the gold-mining industry. There are also churches in Pretoria and thirteen other centres. Five of the twenty-six priests and about half of the nuns and Christian brothers (167) are Irish. The nuns are mostly engaged in teaching. The Sisters of Nazareth have a house in Johannesburg.
In the scattered mission districts of the Orange River Vicariate there are very few Irish Catholics. There are perhaps twenty of them in the small white populations of Basutoland. In Rhodesia there are about seven hundred. One hears of them from time to time in the narratives of the Jesuit missionaries published in the "Zambesi Mission Record". In the remote regions of the mission in its earliest days the Jesuits often came upon and were gladly helped by an Irish mining prospector or a trooper of the mounted police. When William Woodbyrne was pioneering and prospecting in Mashonaland, his wagon was often for weeks at a time the centre of operations of a Jesuit missionary.
Among notable Irish Catholics in South Africa may be mentioned Michael Gallwey, a lawyer of marked ability and for many years Chief Justice of Natal; the Hon. A. Wilmot, K. S. G., who is Irish on the mother's side; Mr. Justice Shell, one of the judges of Cape Colony; Sir William St. John Carr of Johannesburg; the Hon. John Daverin, M. L. C., and Mr. Beauclerk Uppington, M. L. A. The Catholic episcopate has from the outset been mainly Irish. Though many Irish Catholics are connected with colonial journalism in South Africa, the Catholics have not yet any newspaper of their own. The "Catholic Magazine" published monthly at Cape Town, is their chief literary organ. Some of the missionaries issue regular reports, the most important of which is the "Zambesi Mission Record" (monthly). The leading colleges and convent boarding-schools have their school magazines. The "Catholic Directory for British South Africa", issued annually from the Salesian Press, Cape Town, since 1904, forms a valuable record of progress.
In the records of the Latin republics of South America there is ample record of the traditional genius of the sons of St. Patrick to assimilate themselves with whatever people their lot may be presently cast. A number of them took a leading part in the establishment of the independence of several of these governments, and their names are enshrined among their titular heroes of these nations.
In Paraguay, in 1555, there was a revolution headed by one Nicholas Colman. He is reputed to have been a Celt, but the records are not definite. Remembering how intimate, from a remote period, were the social and commercial relations between Ireland and Spain, the parent of most of the South American countries, it is not to be wondered at, perhaps, that even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so many Irish soldiers of fortune, and missionaries, and adventurers found their way across the ocean to the banks of the Amazon and the Plate. Ignoring Colman's claim as the pioneer, the first Irishman whose name appears without contradiction in South American history is the Jesuit Father Thomas Field, who was born in Limerick in 1549, and spent ten years in Brazil and forty in the famous missions in Paraguay of which, with Father de Ortega, he was the founder. At one time he was the only missionary in all Paraguay, and he lived there longer than any other member of his order. Father Thomas Field's parents were William Field, a physician, and his wife Janet Creah. He took a classical course at Paris, studied philosophy for three years at Louvain, and then entered the Society of Jesus at Rome, 6 October, 1574. After six months in the novitiate he showed such progress and solidity of virtue that he was allowed to volunteer for the mission in Brazil. Leaving Rome on 28 April, 1575, he begged his way on foot to St. James of Compostella in Spain and thence to Lisbon, where he remained for two years, mainly at Coimbra. He arrived in Brazil in 1577, and thenceforward his name is usually found transformed into "Filde". Here, under the guidance of the venerable Father Joseph Anchieta, "the Apostle and Thaumaturgus of Brazil", he was trained in the apostolic life and by him was selected to go to evangelize Tucumán and Paraguay.
Father Anchieta, in his annual letter to his superiors for the year 1591, says: "There are three fathers in Paraguay whom its appears have been sent from Brazil . . . they traverse many and vast regions and have brought many thousands of barbarians to the fold of Christ, a work in which they are much helped by their knowledge of the Guaraní language." And the "Letters" for 1592 and 1594 say "Father Solanio sent Fathers de Ortega and Filde to the Guaraní, and it is known that they converted more than two thousand of them." "Father Thomas Filde and Father de Ortega were sent into the province of Guayrá, which lies between Paraguay and Brazil. They have a residence established in Villa Rica, and from thence they go in missions to give spiritual help to innumerable peoples." Among those converted by them were the Ibiragaras, a nation of ten thousand cannibals. The two missionaries remained in Guayrá for eight years and then proceeded to Asunción. In the early part of 1605, Father Filde was the only Jesuit left in all of Tucumán and Paraguay. During the thirteen years he toiled in these missions it is estimated Father Filde and his companions baptized 150,000 Indians. It was at the village of Parapo that, on 2 July, 1610, 200 of these converts were gathered and formed by Father Macheto Cataldino into "Loreto", the first of the historic "Reductions", and the model for all the subsequent communities that made up the "Christian Republic of Misiones". In 1615 Father Filde was made the teacher of Guaraní and other Indian languages to the young Jesuits who were being trained for the missions. In the catalogue of Irish Jesuits for 1617, Father "Thomas Field" is set down as being in Paraguay. He died at Asunción in 1626, retaining an extraordinary physical vigour to the end, in spite of heroic mortifications and zeal for souls.
With this illustrious soul, the record, honourable in all its details, of the Irish element in the Latin American countries begins. Its ramifications are as extended as they are curious and unexpected. At the period preceding the wars of independence, the remarkable fact is presented of Irish-born viceroys governing Mexico, Peru, and Chile for Spain. There were eight Irish regiments in the Spanish service at the opening of the eighteenth century. At its close the Napoleonic Wars brought Spain as an ally of France under the harrow of many English schemes for the spoilation of her South American treasure house and the emancipation from her rule of the several colonies there. In the invading as well as in the colonial armies Irish soldiers were conspicuous. It was then that the foundations of the chief Irish colony, that of the Argentine Republic, were laid. In 1765 a Captain McNamara with two privateering ships attempted to take Colonia (in front of Buenos Aires) from the Spaniards. His ship caught fire and he, and all but 78 of his crew of 262, were lost. The saved were in large part Irish who settled down in the country and became the progenitors of many families with Celtic patronymies still to be found in the Argentine rural provinces. On 24 June, 1906, General William Carr Beresford, an illegitimate son of the Marquess of Waterford, at the head of another English expedition, which had in its ranks hundreds of Irish soldiers, captured the city of Buenos Aires and held it for nearly two months, only surrendering then to overwhelming odds. Again these soldiers contributed numbers of Irish settlers to the country. On 27 June 1907, a third English expedition under General Whitelocks arrived off Buenos Aires. One of its regiments was the 88th, the famous "Connaught Rangers". It also ended disastrously, but left its Irish addition to the local population.
Following we come to the period, 1810-1824, when Buenos Aires was the revolutionary centre of the various efforts that led to the separation from Spain of her south American colonies, and in most of these Irishmen and their sons were prominent. In Buenos Aires there is no name more honoured in the list of Argentina's patriots than that of Admiral William Brown. He had as companions in arms Dillons, O'Gormans, O'Farrells, Sheridans, Butlers, and others. Peter Sheridan, who arrived from Cavan early in the eighteenth century, and Thomas Armstrong from King's County were among the founders of Argentina's great wool industry. Sheridan's brother, Dr. Hugh Sheridan, served under Admiral Brown, and his son, who died at Buenos Aires in 1861, was a famous painter of South American landscapes. The interests of religion in the little Irish colony were first looked after by a friar named Burke, and when he died, Archbishop Murray of Dublin sent out by request Father Patrick Moran, who arrived at Buenos Aires 11 February, 1829. He died there the following May, and was succeeded, October, 1831, by Father Patrick O'Gorman, also from Dublin, who was chaplain until his death, 3 March, 1847, his flock greatly increasing.
In the great Irish exodus following the famine years Argentina received a substantial part of the exile throng. Their counsellor and friend was the Dominican, Fr. Anthony D. Fahy. Born at Loughres, County Gallway, in 1804, he made his ecclesiastical studies at St. Clement's, Rome. Then he spent two years on the missions in the United States in Ohio and Kentucky, after which he was sent to Buenos Aires, where he arrived in 1843. For more than a quarter of a century, until his death from yellow fever, caught while attending a poor Italian, in 1871, his name is intimately identified with the progress and welfare, spiritual and temporal, of the large Irish community in Buenos Aires. In 1856 he brought out a community of Sisters of Mercy under Mother Mary Evangelist Fitzpatrick from Dublin, and built a spacious convent for them. To this have since been added a hospital, a boarding school for girls, and a home for immigrants. In 1873 a branch convent was established as Mercedes about sixty miles distant. In April, 1881, the irreligious sentiment rife in Buenos Aires drove the whole community of eighteen sisters to Australia. In the meantime the real Catholics of Buenos Aires had become ashamed of the cowardice that had allowed the Sisters of Mercy to be forced out of the city by the anti-clerical faction. Petitions were addressed to the Sisters, to the Bishop of Adelaide, and to Rome, asking that the community be sent back. In 1890, six of the Sisters from the Mount Gambier convent, Adelaide, were permitted to return. Their old convent at Rio Bamba was restored to them; their schools reopened; a house for immigrant girls established and within a year $20,000 subscribed to put their orphanage on a secure footing. Father Fahy, moreover, had priests specially trained for this mission at All Hallows College, Dublin, and established libraries, reading rooms, schools, and other means for improving the life of the colony.
An Irish Passionist, Father Martin Byrne, prepared the way for a foundation of his congregation, the pioneers of which, Fathers Timothy Pacetti and Clement Finnegan, arrived at Buenos Aires from the United States, 14 December, 1880. In 1881 Father Fidelis (James Kent Stone), became the superior of their community, which in a short period was increased to fifteen priests and six novices, mostly Irish Americans. Their fine monastery of the Holy Cross was dedicated on 10 January, 1886, and the splendid church attached to it in 1897. In 1897 Father Fidelis established another house of the Passionists near Valparaiso, Chile, and built and had dedicated on 19 March, 1898, the church attached to the monastery of St. Paul of the Cross at Sarmiento.
For many years the Irish colony at Buenos Aires included the famous statistician Michael G. Mullhall (q.v.). In the same field was William Bulfin, editor of a Catholic weekly "The Southern Cross". Born near Birr, King's County, in 1862, he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1884, and spent several years in ranch and commercial life, during which, over the pen-name "Che Buono" he contributed "Tales of the Pampas" and "Sketches of Buenos Aires" to various magazines and publications. In 1892 he joined forces with Michael Dineen, and became a member of the staff of "The Southern Cross", which had been established in 1874, and finally its proprietor and chief editor, in which capacity, he was a leader of thought and progress of the Irish Argentine community. He died in Ireland during a visit there, 2 February, 1910. Another weekly paper circulating in this section is the "Hiberno-Argentine Review". It is estimated that the Irish form about one per cent of the population of Argentina. As the official statistics record them in the tables as natives of Great Britain, positive figures from that source are unavailable. The unmistakable names show, however, that they are well represented in all the walks of political, commercial, professional, and social life.
Chile and Peru revere the memory of a famous Irishman, Ambrose O'Higgins, the "Great Viceroy (1720-1801) and his son, Bernard, the dictator of Chile (1776-1842). In more recent years, Peru and Chile owed much to the enterprise of another Irishman, William R. Grace. In 1851 he began his extensive business at Callao, Peru, with his partner, John Bryce. General John McKenna, born 20 October, 1771, at Cloger, Co. Tyrone, Ireland, was sent, when a boy, to his uncle, Count O'Reilly, at Madrid, and graduated from the military academy at Barcelona, in 1878. In 1796, he went to Peru, where he became one of the leading governmental functionaries. He was on a public work in Chile when the revolution against Spain broke out in September, 1810, and espoused the patriot cause, in which, under Bernard O'Higgins, he did remarkable service. He was killed in a duel on 21 November, 1814. Vicuna McKenna, the statesman and historian of later years, was his grandson, Other Irishmen notable in South American history are Generals John Thurmond O'Brian, Daniel Florence O'Leary, and John Devereux. O'Brian was born in the south of Ireland in 1790 and reached Buenos Aires in 1816. He was with San Martin's army during the campaigns of Chile and Peru, and at the conclusion of the war, in 1821, turned his attention to mining, at which he essayed some remarkable engineering feats. He visited Europe in 1847 as a diplomatic agent and tried to direct Irish emigration to South America. He died at Lisbon in May, 1861.
In January, 1819, General John Devereux, who is styled the "Lafayette of South America", because he had offered his sword and fortune to Simón Bolivar, the Liberator of Bolivia, was commissioned by the latter to go to Ireland and enlist an Irish legion for the aid of the revolution. He landed nearly 2000 men in South America in January, 1820. The legion won the decisive battle of Carabobo on 24 June, 1821. Among its officers was Colonel (afterwards General) Daniel Florence O'Leary (b. at Cork, 14 Feb., 1801; d. at Rome in 1868), often employed by Bolivar on important diplomatic missions. His memoirs, letters, and documents, compiled by his son, were published by the Venezuelan Government. General John O'Connor, who claimed to be a descendant of the last King of Ireland, raised a regiment of volunteers and brought them to Peru at his own expense, and fought all through the campaigns of Venezuela and New Granada. After the end of hostilities he was made minister of War in Bolivia and died in 1870 at an advanced age. Among other Irish soldiers of note in these wars might be mentioned Major Thomas Craig, Major John King, Colonel Charles O'Carroll, Lieut. Colonel Moran, Captain Charles Murphy, and Lieutenant Maurice O'Connell. All through these Latin republics there are hundreds of families, the grandchildren of these men, who bear these and other Irish names, but who are as Spanish in language and character as any of their compatriots of pure Spanish descent. In Argentina this condition is especially notable.
I. IN THE UNITED STATES: Pendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (New York, 1868); D'Arcy McGee, A History of the Irish Settlers in North America (Boston, 1852); Harrison, The Scot in Ulster (Edinburgh, 1888); D'Arcy McGee, A Popular History of Ireland (Glasgow); Walpole, A Short History of the Kingdom of Ireland (New York, 1882); O'Kane Murray, Popular History of the Catholic Church in the United States (New York, 1876); De Courcy, History of the Catholic Church in America, ed. by J. G. Shea (New York, New York, 1857); Bagenal, The American Irish (Boston, 1882); Maguire, The Irish in America (New York, 1868); Immigration into the United States, U. S. Bureau of Statistics, Monograph (Washington, 1903); Thébaud, Ireland, Past and Present (New York, 1901); Stephenson Gregg, Irish History for English Readers (New York, 1886); Kapp, Immigration and the Commissioners of Emigration of the State of New York (New York, 1870); Conyngham, The Irish Brigade and Its Campaigns (New York, 1867); Young, Tour in Ireland (1776-1779) (reprint) (London, 1892); Treacy, Old Catholic Maryland and its early Jesuit Missionaries (1889); O'Donoghue, The Geographical Distribution of Irish Ability (Dublin, 1906); O'Rourke, History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (Dublin, 1902); The Original Lists of Persons of Quality; emigrants; religious exiles; political rebels; serving men sold for a term of years; apprentices; children stolen; maidens pressed; and others who went from Great Britain to the American Plantations — 1600-1700, edited from manuscripts preserved etc. by John Camden Hotten (New York, 1874); A. M. Sullivan, New Ireland (Philadelphia, 1878); Lester, The Glory and Shame of England (New York, 1866); O'Connor, The Parnell Movement (London, 1887); O'Neill Daunt, Ireland and Her Agitators (Dublin, 1867); Annals of the Sisters of Mercy (New York, 1889); Spading, The Religious Mission of the Irish People, etc. (New York, 1880); Hanna, The Scotch-Irish, or the Scot in North Britain, North Ireland, and North America (New York, 1802); Abstract of the 12th Census (1900); and other Census and Emigration Reports (Washington); files of the Boston Pilot and other Irish and Catholic newspapers; American Catholic Historical Society Publications (Boston, 1898-1906); American Catholic Historical Researches (Philadelphia, 1884-1910); Cullen, The Story of the Irish in Boston (Boston, 1889); Campbell, History of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick (Philadelphia, 1892).
II. IN AUSTRALIA: Files of the Freeman's Journal (Sydney); New Zealand Tablet (Dunedin); Advocate, Tribune (Melbourne); The Age (Adelaide); Southern Cross (Perth); Duffy, Life in the Two Hemispheres (London, 1903); and the bibliography given with the article Australia.
III. IN CANADA: Davin, The Irishman in Canada (London, 1877); O'Callaghan, Documentary History of the State of New York, X (Albany, 1858); O'Callaghan, The Irish Brigades in the Service of France (New York, 1874); MacGuire, The Irish in America (London, 1877); Reports of the Canadian Archives (Ottawa, 1905); MacMillan, The Early History of Prince Edward Island (Quebec, 1905); The Canada Yearbook (Ottawa, 1908); Vie de Madame d'Youville (Ville Marie, 1852); Ferland, Biographical Notice of Joseph Octave Plessis, Bishop of Quebec (Quebec, 1864); Têtu, Journal des visits pastorales de Mgr Plessis (Quebec, 1903); Alexis, L'Église Catholique au Canada (Quebec, 1909); Morice, History of the Cath. Church in Western Canada (Toronto, 1910); Laut, The Conquest of the Great Northwest (2 vols, Toronto, 1909).
IV. IN GREAT BRITAIN: Bellerheim, Hist. of Cath. Ch. in Scotland, IV (Edinburgh, 1890); MacCaffrey, Hist. of Cath. Ch. in the Nineteenth Century II (Dublin, 1909); O'Brien, Two Centuries of Irish History, 1691-1870 (London, 1907); Gern, The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing (London, 1908); Denvir, The Irish in Britain (London, 1892); Boyle, St. Vincent de Paul and the Vincentians in Ireland, Scotland, and England (London, 1909); Census for England and Wales (London, 1901); Census for Scotland (London, 1901); Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland (Dublin, 1899-1908); Catholic Directory for England (London, 1910); Catholic directory for Scotland (Glasgow, 1910); Statesman's Yearbook (London, 1910); The Catholic Who's Who (London, 1910).
V. IN SOUTH AFRICA: The above article is based on the official census returns and on detailed communications kindly supplied to the writer by the Vicars Apostolic of the Eastern vicariate of Cape Colony, Kimberley, and Natal.
VI. IN SOUTH AMERICA: Southey, History of Brazil (London, 1810; Sp. tr. Rio de Janiero, 1862); Gay, Historia fisica y politica de Chile (Santiago, 1844-65); Simon B. O'Leary, Memorias del General O'Leary (Caracas, 1879); Dawson, South American Republics (London, 1903); Markham, History of Peru (Chicago, 1893); Arana, Historia General de Chile (Santiago, 1884-85); Marion McM. Mullhall, Explorers in the New World (London, 1909); Fitzgerald, Ireland and Her People (Chicago, 1909-1910); Webb, Compendium of Irish Biography (London, 1878); Hogan, Distinguished Irishmen of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1894); Dict. Nat. Biog., s. vv.; The Standard, The Southern Cross (Buenos Aires, files). Also the bibliographies for the articles on the several Latin American counties.
APA citation. (1910). The Irish (in countries other than Ireland). In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08132b.htm
MLA citation. "The Irish (in countries other than Ireland)." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 8. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08132b.htm>.
Transcription. This article was transcribed for New Advent by M. Donahue.
Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. October 1, 1910. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York.
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