It will be astonishing to one who looks into the question to find that, in face of all the evidence that abounds in American annals, showing that our people were here on this soil fighting the battles of the colonists, and in a later day of the infant Republic, thus proving our claim to the gratitude of this nation, America has produced men so ignoble and disingenuous as to say that the Irish who were here in Revolutionary days “were for the most part heartily loyal,” that “the combatants were of the same race and blood”, and that the great uprising became, in fact, “a contest between brothers”!

Although many writers have made inquiries into this subject, nearly all have confined themselves to the period of the Revolution.  We are of “the fighting race”, and in our enthusiasm for the fighting man the fact seems to have been overlooked that in other noble fields of endeavor, and in some respects infinitely more important, men of Irish blood have occupied prominent places in American history, for which they have received but scant recognition.  The pioneers before whose hands the primeval forests fell prostrate; the builders, by whose magic touch have sprung into existence flourishing towns and cities, where once no sounds were heard save those of nature and her wildest offspring; the orators who roused the colonists into activity and showed them the way to achieve their independence; the schoolmasters who imparted to the American youth their first lessons in intellectuality and patriotism; all have their place in history, and of these we can claim that Ireland furnished her full quota to the American colonies.

It must now be accepted as an indisputable fact that a very large proportion of the earliest settlers in the American colonies were of Irish blood, for the Irish have been coming here since the beginning of the English colonization.  It has been estimated by competent authorities that in the middle of the seventeenth century the English-speaking colonists numbered 50,000.  Sir William Petty, the English statistician, tells us that during the decade from 1649 to 1659 the annual emigration from Ireland to the western continent was upwards of 6000, thus making, in that space of time, 60,000 souls, or about one-half of what the whole population must have been in 1659.  And from 1659 to 1672 there emigrated from Ireland to America the yearly number of 3000 (Dobbs, on Irish Trade, Dublin, 1729).  Prendergast, another noted authority, in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, furnishes ample verification of this by the statistics which he quotes from the English records.  Richard Hakluyt, the chronicler of the first Virginia expeditions, in his Voyages, Navigations, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1600), shows that Irishmen came with Raleigh to Virginia in 1587 and, in fact, the ubiquitous Celts were with Sir John Hawkins in his voyage to the Gulf of Mexico twenty years earlier.  The famous work of John Camden Hotten, entitled “The