> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.eagnajournal.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Hibernia's Seed - URL: https://www.eagnajournal.com/hibernias-seed/ - Published: 2026-10-23T16:18:11.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-23T17:21:51.000Z - Description: The Forgotten First Wave of Irish America - Author: Culture Crusade - Tags: Essay ### The Special Relationship When John Fitzgerald Kennedy landed in Ireland in June 1963, it was an ethnic homecoming he described as the best four days of his life. The visit remains the ceremonial zenith of the Irish-American connection, but it was never the whole of it. Nixon sought out the grave of his Quaker forebears at Timahoe, Reagan went to Ballyporeen, Obama to Moneygall, Biden to Ballina, and each, in his own way, was performing the same core ritual: the American president as prodigal son. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/c1/2ac1ec3c-1c95-434e-8450-30d600c86034/content/images/2026/10/jfk-new_ross_1963.jpg) JFK in New Ross The affection is bipartisan, and not strictly reserved for descendants. Trump is no progeny of Erin, but as the son of a native Gaelic-speaking mother from the Hebrides, he possesses real Gaelic credentials. Perhaps a stirring of Dál Riatan blood explains his often favourable sentiments towards the old country, and his brief transformation into *óglaoch Domhnall* when, on his 2026 visit for the Irish Open, he sat down with the Taoiseach at Farmleigh and proclaimed: *"I'd love to see it unified… The way I look at it, it's going to happen eventually. It may as well happen now."* But despite what Trump’s nonchalant outbursts would suggest, the bond is more than pageantry. The fact remains that the deep ethno-cultural ties between the United States and Ireland remain profound, not merely residual, despite having been pronounced dead or dying innumerable times by those who would see them dissolved for political gain. It is also true, however, that the old love affair is regarded with abiding jealousy by factions with a historical—and contemporary— axe to grind against Ireland. The tireless work of anti-Hibernian spin-doctors is encountered daily on many platforms, nipping at the heels of the "special relationship". Their tools are various, but all aim at denigration, tactical nihilism and, ultimately, the erasure of Irish-American history. Irish immigration is cast unforgivingly as a solely 19th\-century phenomenon, and their coming ashore as aliens in a WASP world, instead of the second wave landing in a country their predecessors helped create. None of this is new: Historical hagiographies that diminish the Irish part in forging the United States, to the profit of Albionic triumphalism, are a deep well, revisited frequently by Hollywood and regime academics alike. Noel Ignatiev's *How the Irish Became White* and the Harvey Weinstein-produced *Gangs of New York* are very different works, but they share a common effect: both present Irish America as a creature of the nineteenth-century slum and the famine ship, and so leave the Irish of the formative period out of the picture. Popular works of cultural history have done the same by other means. David Hackett Fischer's hugely popular 1989 release *Albion's Seed* folds Ulster migrants—while ignoring migrants from the other Irish provinces—into a broader “North British borderer” culture which can leave readers underestimating early Irish presence in America. By sorting the eighteenth-century arrivals almost entirely into the “Scots-Irish”, it neatly files their influence as one of four British "folkways" and gives the impression that no true Irishman reached America before the first famine ships came to port. Its popularity has contributed greatly to absurd discourse that equates Irish-Americans exclusively with Ellis Islanders, a falsehood remarkable for the degree of its circulation, but also because of the refusal of its proponents to contend with the most basic facts of Irish arrival—the great Catholic emigration came ashore at New York and Boston decades before Ellis Island opened. Its endurance as a myth remains an injustice for which popularisers like Fischer have much to answer for. While the nineteenth-century wave will always be the backbone of Irish America, it does not follow that an inch should be given on the part played by its predecessors in forging the fledgling republic. Laying bare the facts of pre-nineteenth-century Hiberno-American history then is the required antidote: the presence and volume of Irish settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the abundance of Gaelic surnames and the overapplication of the "Scots" prefix, the Irish contribution to the War of Independence, the influence of Irish jurisprudence on American revolutionary thought, and the Celtic culture of the Old South. A word on terms. “Irish” here means what it meant to the people who used it in the eighteenth century: those born in Ireland, or descended from those who were, of whatever confession. Within that, the essay rests on three claims on Irish identity. The first is that the so-called Scots-Irish were Irish. It is what they called themselves and how others referred to them, and the prefix, with the religious and ethnic pigeon-holing that came with it, is a nineteenth-century imposition that should not be the deciding factor. The second is that the Scots-Irish were never the clean planter category the label implies. Many were of mixed descent, often with Scottish Gaelic ancestry, and sometimes native Gaelic. Cultural similarities between the Scots-Gaelic element—their regions being originally seeded by Ulster Gaels— and natives were not insignificant, furnishing them with ‘transferable credits’ towards an Irish identity claim at a time when the community had no objections to it. The third is that the Scots-Irish Protestant framework that has taken over since the 19th century has overwritten the significant Irish Gaelic Catholic element in the colonies, whose presence an accurate analysis of surnames, and contemporary accounts restores. But first there is a starting point beyond these topics, namely the myths that surround the genesis of a nation. Founding myths play a central role in the identity of states and new peoples, often melding historical fact with spirituality and even eschatology. Their role in common assumptions about American identity is too important to ignore, so there we begin. ### Founding Myths and Bragging Rights In the conquest of virgin and expansive territory by new civilisations, ideological or spiritual frameworks that ratify the taking of the land tend to develop in tandem. It is a perennial feature of human conquest, from Alexander, who hurled his spear from the ship into the Asian shore and claimed the continent as "spear-won" land, to Europeans in the Americas. The question here is whose myth has crowded out the rest. The Pilgrims, arriving on the *Mayflower*, saw in the new continent echoes of Eden: a new Judea to settle after exodus from Europe, held by divine grant and providence as a covenant people. The Puritans who followed them made the thought a creed, John Winthrop imagining Massachusetts as a "city upon a hill". The Spanish, earlier to the Americas, had their own framework, mediated through papal authority, in which their acts were those of God's proselytising soldiers. In North America the Puritan mythos has held sway over all others, and the answer to our question is plain: it has done so mostly because of the northern European and Protestant character of the settlements and their ability, unlike the Spanish, who tended to create heavily miscegenated societies, to retain an intact ethno-cultural identity. Founding myths collapse history into the present and connect old voyages with living communities, if only because they justify the presence of those communities. They are, in effect, a bragging right. The Italian American is assured in his American existence by the deeds of Christopher Columbus, and can declare, in the manner of Tony Soprano, "In this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero. End of story." In the mind of such a man, Plymouth and Jamestown don't matter much; his man "got there first". Here we see the importance of chronology, another cornerstone of these myths, since antiquity lends its own prestige in the great international competition over who first planted the flag. If the Pilgrims arrived on the coattails of the Spanish and their Genoese admiral, the Spanish were themselves bested by nearly five centuries by Leif Erikson, about whom we know much less. Yet, as if to prove the power of these voyage sagas, that has not stopped Midwesterners of Scandinavian descent from claiming a righteous place in North America through the achievements of their wayfaring medieval forebear. It matters little to them that the Norse landfall, at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, lay in what is now Canada rather than within the territorial extent of the modern United States—what counts is the jewel prize of having reached the North American New World at all. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/c1/2ac1ec3c-1c95-434e-8450-30d600c86034/content/images/2026/10/brendan-whale-colored-manuscript.jpg) The voyage of St. Brendan The Irish too have a founding myth, though it has little settlement in it, and it chronologically supersedes the others in the voyages of Saint Brendan. Brendan, a Munster monk of the formative years of Irish Christianity, is said to have sailed west into the foreboding horizon of a vast, unexplored Atlantic in search of the *Terra Repromissionis Sanctorum*, the Promised Land of the Saints: an earthly paradise God has reserved for the holy, to be given more fully at the end of time. The *Navigatio Sancti Brendani* describes a seven-year odyssey of much wandering and tumult, including the loss of three brothers and the passing of a barren island that hurled glowing rocks into a boiling sea, a description many have taken for the first arrival of man at Iceland. The weary voyagers eventually reach the promised land, where they are allowed to wander for forty days, take mementoes and return home without settling, which was not their task; that full gift belonged to a later age \[1\]. Indeed, it is a popular belief that Brendan's voyage led him to America, since the land he reaches lies far west of the fiery proto-Iceland, and the "full gift" envisioned by the sixth-century voyager was then remarkably prescient, given the settlement from Christian Europe, and from his own homeland in particular, that would take place at that "later age". The power of the story, whatever its knotted mytho-poetic elements, was perhaps not lost on President Catherine Connolly, who presented Trump with a copy of the obscure *Navigatio* on his visit to the Áras. But the leap from the sixth-century voyage to the far more tangible colonial era, which began the great transfer of European populations and their civilisation to the Americas, is a large one, and it requires tangible facts to establish an Irish presence. The English, of course, played a crucial and outsized part in seeding North America, and that is as resolute a fact as any, but it is also the only part of the story the Pilgrim myth tells. However, the narrative slide from numerical dominance to exclusivity is a sleight of hand that need not be tolerated. The *Mayflower* mythos, which posits the plucky Pilgrim as founder of a de facto Protestant ethno-state, has had an abiding and malign influence on historiographers and ethnographers of the American colonies, who project the notion onto all the early pioneers. ### The Colonial Period The extant documentation shows an Irish presence from the early settlements of a United States in gestation. Among the early colonists at Jamestown were the Irish sailor Francis Magnel and, shortly after, a countryman, Dionis O'Conor. In 1626, William Bradford recorded that a ship bound for Virginia had been wrecked on the Cape Cod shore with many servants aboard, "many of them being Irish", and Plymouth sheltered the passengers for months \[2\]. Many more quintessentially Irish names surface on the lists of new arrivals and of the dead at Jamestown. In *Early Irish Settlers in Virginia*, John Linehan noted \[3\]: *"In Hotten's Original Lists of emigrants, among others is published the names of the following persons arriving in Virginia between 1616 and 1624: John Higgins, John Cannon, John Collins, John Healey, Francis Downing, John Fludd, Tege Lane, 'of Corke in Ireland'; Tege Williams, 'Irishman'; John French, of Washford '(Wexford) in Ireland'; Thomas Cawsey (Casey), James Connor, James Dore, Ann Mighill, John Duffee, Thomas Doughtie (Dougherty)… Some, undoubtedly, of the foregoing came here as the servants of English landed proprietors in Ireland, and there is no doubt that others came as actual settlers, for there is mention later of grants of land to some of them. Let that be as it may, however, here was quite an addition to the scant population of the colony of a liberal mixture of Irish blood with that of the early English settlers."* Ireland, as one half of a dual monarchy with England—a union concocted and implemented by the 16th century Tudor state to the latter’s benefit—became a natural source population for colonies founded by royal charter, and doubly so as the Crown increasingly dispossessed Irish landholders, forcing some lords to seek better opportunities in the New World and ordinary people into indentured service. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/c1/2ac1ec3c-1c95-434e-8450-30d600c86034/content/images/2026/10/Colonel_Thomas_Dongan.jpg) Governor of New York Thomas Dongan Nor were the colonies an exclusively English endeavour in their very charters. In 1634 Charles I issued a charter through the Kingdom of Ireland for a colony called New Albion, to cover parts of what became New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Settlement was attempted in 1642 but collapsed after a mutiny. In Maryland, a far more successful enterprise initially set up as a haven for Catholics, disenfranchised Irish found an opportunity to set up and prosper. One famous example is Charles Carroll of the dispossessed Ely O'Carrolls, who arrived in 1688 as attorney general for Lord Baltimore. His Gaelic-derived dynasty went on to become one of the wealthiest families in the colonies, and his grandson, also Charles, would be the only Catholic signatory of the Declaration of Independence and its last surviving signer. Nor was Carroll the only Irish Catholic in a venerated position in the early colonies. Thomas Dongan of Castletown, Co. Kildare, was governor of New York from 1683 to 1688, and used the post to encourage the settlement of his countrymen in a colony he believed they could be very content in. He called the first assembly, passed the Charter of Libertyes and issued the 1686 Dongan Charter for New York City, which is still the basis of city government. A Jesuit chaplain is even said to have been brought over to accompany him. ### Irish or Scots-Irish? The eighteenth-century Irish arrival was greater still in scale, but an accurate portrayal of it must overcome the excessive attachment of the "Scotch" prefix to this wave of colonists. It is well attested that a great number of Ulster Protestants settled in America in that century, and that many possessed planter ancestry, descended from settlers from Scotland from the seventeenth century on. This is not, however, the full picture. The ethnicity of the Irish arrivals was much more heterogeneous than the label allows, and the problem is compounded by the retrospective nature of the prefix, taken up below. As Donald Harman Akenson of Queen’s University put it: *"To assume that all persons leaving Ireland before 1790 were Ulster Presbyterians of Scottish descent is a demographic absurdity..."*\[4\] Another work, Michael J. O'Brien's 1919 *A Hidden Phase of American History,* goes a long way towards rectifying some of the misperceptions. It gives a comprehensive account of the Irish contribution to the eighteenth century in particular, relying on primary sources such as muster rolls and state records to lend statistical robustness. O'Brien first refutes the claim that pre-Revolutionary emigration was confined to northern ports, analysing the Custom House shipping registers at New York and Philadelphia, which showed 329 sailings from non-Ulster Irish ports against 247 from Ulster between 1771 and 1774, with similar proportions in 1767-1769\. Passenger-carrying merchant vessels operated out of every major Irish port \[5\]. O'Brien also drew attention to the nuances of the Ulster situation, which—though there was significant ethnic cross-pollination—was home to two substantial populations of roughly comparable size, and both sides of the confessional divide availed of Atlantic transit to escape penal laws and agrarian oppression. To put all Ulster emigration under the rubric of Scotch-Irish glosses over the very real presence of native Gaelic and Catholic tenant farmers and labourers, and even of Gaelic Protestant converts, who fled the same oppressions alongside their Presbyterian neighbours, on the same vessels from the same ports. O'Brien takes umbrage, too, at the anachronism of a "Scotch-Irish" label for the eighteenth century, as it was not how the settlers identified themselves. In colonial records, muster rolls and societies they were simply Irish; when it came to social life they joined the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick over Scottish clubs. A significant portion of Ulster Protestants could, moreover, already trace a mixed heritage, since intermarriage with the Gaelic Irish was not uncommon in the first century of planter and Gael coexistence, before the entrenched sectarian divides of later times. Moreover, the Ulster Presbyterians who left in the first nine decades of the eighteenth century also departed before the Orange Order was founded in 1795, which British statecraft cynically encouraged and leveraged as a sectarian bludgeon against the Catholic-Dissenter cooperation achieved by the United Irishmen. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/c1/2ac1ec3c-1c95-434e-8450-30d600c86034/content/images/2026/10/55588_view_02_02.jpg) *A Hidden Phase* also singles out the tendency of historians to shoehorn names into ethnic categories on the basis of religious loyalty. Many unmistakably Gaelic surnames on American rolls, from McCarthy to Murphy, belonged to Protestants, a fact that owes more to the limited—though far from absent—presence of the Catholic Church in the colonies than to any proof that their bearers were Scots. Mass conversion events like the Great Awakening, which swept through the colonies in the mid-1700s, and the anti-monarchical temper of the movement, seen as American rather than British, may well have made the shift palatable to Irish Catholic colonists. The hyphenated "Scotch-Irish" identity was thus largely a retrospective construction. It did not become the standard self-description until the nineteenth century, when famine immigration gave the older Protestant stock reason to distinguish itself from the Catholic newcomers and soothed Protestant nativism; it was later carried forward by works like *Albion's Seed* \[6\], which in effect recast the Irish cultural and demographic impact as a disguised British one. Moreover, such a narrative commits a triple fallacy: it takes all planters to be unmixed, all Ulstermen to be planters, and all Irish colonists to be Ulstermen. It would have seemed a strange fabrication to the denizens of eighteenth-century America themselves, to whom Irish cultural, economic and martial involvement was simply a given, and spoken of regularly. The misunderstanding has distorted the interpretation of the available data. O'Brien shows that the 1909 Census Bureau publication *A Century of Population Growth* put the Irish at just under 2 per cent of the 1790 population, because its statisticians used a flawed surname method that classed transformed, translated or prefix-stripped Gaelic names as "English" or "Scotch". The absurdity is plain from the fact that Revolutionary War rosters and colonial records alone contain more individuals bearing distinct Irish surnames than the total the Census Bureau recorded for those families nationwide \[5, 7\]. More than a century has passed since O'Brien's polemical but detailed work, and successive generations of academics have moved closer to his thesis. Thomas L. Purvis's 1984 reassessment of the 1790 census remains the standard benchmark. He estimated that native, Gaelic Irish made up 6.3 per cent of the white population and "Ulster Scots" 9.0 per cent, just over 15 per cent combined, against the 1909 report's figure of under 2 \[8\]. Yet critics such as Akenson and Miller hold that his split still favours the Scots-Irish. Purvis applied surname probabilities from Matheson's 1890 Irish birth registers to 1790 names, ignoring how Famine-era emigration had left Ulster more Protestant by 1890 than in the eighteenth century, so names concentrated in Ulster in 1890 were coded Ulster-Scots, absorbing earlier Gaelic residents. Shared names such as McKinley, Kennedy, McDonald and Neill/McNeill were placed mostly with the Ulster-Scots, and penal-era alterations, such as dropping the O' or Mac, anglicising a spelling (O'Hea to Hayes) or translating a name (MacGowan to Smith), went unrecovered \[4, 9, 10\]. Whatever the exact split, the latest estimates show people of Irish heritage, Gaelic and Ulster-Scots alike, at around 15 per cent of the white population of the United States in 1790, though if we follow O’Brien’s reasoning, there is reason to believe the true figure was higher. But setting aside the opaqueness of census interpretation, one domain gives a clearer demonstration of the quantity and quality of Irish colonial contribution: war. ### Irish Soldiering for American Freedom Familiarity with war and strong martial traditions led the Irish of the colonies to be overrepresented in the militias and armies that fought the War of Independence. According to the muster rolls in O'Brien's analysis, the ranks of the Continental Army that faced down Howe and Clinton were filled with Irish surnames: 695 Kellys, 494 Murphys, 331 McCarthys, 327 Connors, 322 Ryans, 266 Sullivans, and thousands more under other Gaelic names. In all, O'Brien counted 12,200 soldiers under approximately a hundred surnames with a strong Irish connection \[5\]. The reports of British generals and loyalists from their engagements with the Americans are very telling. Joseph Galloway, the Pennsylvania Loyalist who examined deserters for Howe around Philadelphia, testified in 1779 that of the men, *"there were scarcely one-fourth natives of America; about one-half Irish; the other fourth were English and Scotch."* Sir Henry Clinton, trying to peel Europeans out of Washington's army, told Lord Germain that *"the Emigrants from Ireland were in general to be looked upon as our most serious Antagonists."* Viscount Mountjoy was assured, he later said, that *"the major part of the American Army was composed of Irish, and that the Irish language was as commonly spoken in the American ranks as English,"* and in 1784 declared in parliament that *"America was lost by Irish emigrants… it was their valour determined the contest."* \[5, 11\] Part of the context was the weight of the Irish population in Pennsylvania, one of the key theatres of the war, which led Henry Lee to write that the Continental troops of that state, *"known by the designation of the Line of Pennsylvania, might have been, with more propriety, called the Line of Ireland."* \[12\] ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/c1/2ac1ec3c-1c95-434e-8450-30d600c86034/content/images/2026/10/1739278326121-1.jpg) John Barry, "Father of the Navy" Higher up the ranks, Irish and Irish-descended figures were a crucial part of the military elite that delivered the nascent republic. John Barry of Wexford proved his tactical cunning at sea and is renowned as the father of the American Navy. Among Washington's generals and senior officers were John Sullivan, Stephen Moylan and Richard Butler, and his Irish-born aides included John Fitzgerald of Wicklow. In June 1776 the New York papers reported Washington's toast, a sentiment not far from the lips of any dyed-in-the-wool Fenian: *"May the generous sons of Saint Patrick expel all the venomous reptiles of Britain."* On 16 March 1780, after the killing winter at Morristown, he congratulated the army on Ireland's bid to recover "their ancient Rights and Freedom", called the Irish "a brave and generous people", and made St. Patrick's Day a holiday, a rare day of rest for the army. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/c1/2ac1ec3c-1c95-434e-8450-30d600c86034/content/images/2026/10/1stCommitteeSealJohnMacArthur2020.jpg) "The Six principal nations of Europe from whom the Americans have originated" Of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll and Thomas Lynch were descended from Irish families pressured or outright dispossessed in the seventeenth century. Two further distinctions are worth recording: Stephen Moylan of Cork has the prestige of the earliest known written use of the phrase "United States of America", and James Hoban of Kilkenny that of architect of the White House. It is also worth noting that in the preliminary design for the coat of arms of the United States, overseen by Jefferson, Franklin and Adams in 1776, a shield divided into six quarters for "the Six principal nations of Europe from whom the Americans have originated" contained a golden harp for the Irish portion of the founding stock, alongside the heraldry of the English, Scots, Dutch, Germans and French \[13\]. Naturally, with such contributions, Irish numerical, martial, and cultural involvement in America’s hallowed and formative 18th century becomes undeniable. ### Ireland's Intellectual Influence on the American Tradition It has been shown that the Irish gave the Revolution ample men and muskets. They also furnished it with arguments. The American Constitution itself has some genealogical debt to Irish intellectuals who argued against rule without representation. The influence of William Molyneux is widely acknowledged, and his pamphlets circulated in the colonies throughout the eighteenth century. His 1698 *The Case of Ireland's Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated* was especially popular among colonists who saw many of the imperial injustices suffered by Ireland and by the colonies as one and the same. Molyneux—though he spoke for the protestant ascendancy—denied the authority of the English Parliament over Ireland, which he defined as a sister kingdom entitled to equal rights. What is less known is that he was carrying forward the constitutional jurisprudence of Patrick D'Arcy, the Galway-born Catholic lawyer of the Irish Confederates of the seventeenth century. D'Arcy's *Argument*, delivered in 1641, was a detailed legal statement that the Irish were free subjects, to be governed by the common law and by statutes and customs established in Ireland itself, and not by the acts of the English Parliament or the caprices of royal officials \[14, 15\]. The constitutional historian Charles Howard McIlwain, author of *The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation* (1923), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History, treated the Irish constitutional tradition as one of the main historical sources of the argument the colonists used against Parliament. Irish precedents supplied some of the strongest historical support for the claim that the king's subjects outside England were bound by the common law and by their own legislatures, but not by the statutes of an English Parliament in which they were not adequately represented. McIlwain singled out D'Arcy, whose *Argument* he described as "the first definite statement of the central point of the American opposition more than a century later", adding that the lawyer "deserves a place in American constitutional history." \[16\] Contemporaries were hardly unaware of the connection. In 1775 the Continental Congress issued an "Address to the People of Ireland", urging the Irish to support the cause of American independence. It explicitly acknowledged the existing relationship, invoking the many ties between the colonists and the Irish, whose emigrants had found "Hospitality, Peace, and Affluence" in North America: *"Your parliament has done us no wrong. You had ever been friendly to the rights of mankind; and we acknowledge with pleasure and gratitude that your nation has produced patriots who have nobly distinguished themselves in the cause of humanity and America."* The address shows a republican movement looking for friends abroad, carefully crafted to appeal to Ireland through emigration ties and its status as a great furnisher of American soldiery, in the hope of winning support from an Irish Parliament that, though still legislatively subordinate to Westminster until 1782, was a body whose opinion carried weight \[17\]. Though not from the Irish Parliament, it was an Irishman, the philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke, who defended the colonists in the British House of Commons in the same year, with speeches urging reconciliation and concessions to America, including its power to tax itself. One Irish philosopher went so far as to visit the American colonies. The Irish idealist philosopher George Berkeley spent a few years in colonial America advocating more colleges and churches, and his gift of books to Yale transformed its library. His poem "Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America", written before he sailed, supplied the line "Westward the course of empire takes its way", which later generations of Americans would read as a poetic prophecy of manifest destiny. And manifest they would. But what has been the lasting impact of these individual deeds and influences? One might argue that these individual parts do not add up to the sum of a Hibernia’s seed without an enduring cultural existence derived from Ireland. To demonstrate this reality, we must look southward. ### The Celtic Culture of the Old South The great cultural divide in America has always been between North and South, and Irish-American settlement has long been associated with the former. The nineteenth-century transfers of rural Catholic Irish created ethnic strongholds from Boston to Chicago which have received much attention and analysis, but the South in earlier centuries is a criminally overlooked chapter of Irish-American history. In the 1980s the academics Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald began to push back against the conventional historiography of the Old South as an Anglo-Saxon outgrowth with a small Celtic influence. McWhiney's influential *Cracker Culture* gave form to the "Celtic thesis": that the Celtic element was the dominant factor, numerically and culturally, in the formation of the South as a distinct region of the New World. Using settlement data, surname analysis, cultural comparison and contemporary observation, McWhiney makes the case that the distinctiveness of the South is a direct consequence of its majority Celtic founders from Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, who outnumbered the settlers of Anglo-Saxon descent in many key Southern regions. The Irish were only one strand of that Celtic whole, but the comparisons below return to them again and again. Colonists from the "Celtic fringe" migrated westward from an initial base in the Southern backcountry and established their culture across the antebellum South. In contrast to the mixed agriculture of New England and the dour character of the Yankee, "cracker culture" preserved open-range herding and a leisurely, honour-bound way of life, with strong family bonds and sensual pleasures such as song, gaming, fighting, duelling, hunting and drinking \[18, 19\]. The thesis has had sharp critics, among them Rowland Berthoff, who wrote of a "Celtic mist" over the South \[20\]; but they have had to answer the evidence McWhiney marshals, which is quoted here at some length. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/c1/2ac1ec3c-1c95-434e-8450-30d600c86034/content/images/2026/10/il_fullxfull.2903938835_jwc9.webp) Many of these attributes are tied directly to Irish influence. The emphasis on pasture over tillage was a defining part of the Irish rural economy, in which *"every cornfield had to be specially fenced off in such a way as to keep cattle from entering"*, the opposite of English enclosing laws and identical to the Southern open-range system. One Yankee teacher remarked that Irishmen tended to migrate to the South, where they hoped *"to find all the luxuries of life in abundance without labor"*. Comparisons between the honour culture and regular violence of the Old South and Ireland were common. Many of the observers were hostile, but the common denominator of their comparisons is telling. In 1785 a traveller in South Carolina reported the white population there to be the *"ignorant, drunken descendants of the wild Irish"*, *"poor as rats, proud as dons… lazy… \[and with\] no morals"*. In 1861 an Englishman remarked that the South *"appears to resemble Ireland, or what Ireland was 60 years ago. One hears of bowie-knives and revolvers continually…"* Duelling as an extra-judicial way of settling scores was rampant in both Ireland and the antebellum South, and South Carolina's duelling code was modelled directly on the Irish *Code Duello* \[18\]. In their lavish hospitality, Southerners also mirrored the Irish. Wealthy planters across the South shared the "national spirit of hospitality" of the Irish gentry, who thought it a disgrace to lock pantry doors or to leave even the poorest traveller without cabin and food. The dominance of an oral culture is also noteworthy: unlike the Anglo-Saxon North, the Old South, like Ireland, was obsessed with conversation and storytelling, and it is fitting that its great national epic, *Gone with the Wind*, has a protagonist of Irish descent, Scarlett O'Hara. Southerners themselves were very much aware of the Irish connection. The diarist Mary Chesnut, chronicler of the fall of the Confederacy, observed in 1861 that *"so many \[Southerners\] are descendants of Irishmen"*. The Mississippi traveller John Claiborne described the settlers of Covington County as *"a type of old Ireland, generous, ardent, enthusiastic, hospitable and a true-blue Republican"*, while another traveller reported that Kentuckians were a *"sort of genteel Irish"*. Anticipating the objection that the Scots-Irish were simply transplanted Scottish Lowlanders, and so more Germanic than Celtic, McWhiney dismisses the notion of unmixed, purely Scots-Lowland populations as misguided. The cultural and ethnic ties between Ulster and Scotland had existed for centuries, and the North Channel was far from an isolating sea border but a watery highway: *"Ulster men, Hebrideans, and western Highlanders were all but indistinguishable, having for centuries been a part of a single, herding, seafaring, and warrior culture that as a practical matter had been politically autonomous under the Lordship of the Isles until the end of the fifteenth century."* \[18\] The deep historical links, from the seeding of Gaelic Scotland from Ulster to the backwash of Scottish populations into Ireland in the late medieval and early modern eras, require nuance in the Scots-Irish label. Scots-Irish aside, the typical surnames of the non-Ulster provinces were to be found all over the backcountry, and their assimilation into frontier denominations is readily apparent. McWhiney cites a Catholic bishop who reported that *"no less than forty thousand had lost the Faith in the Carolinas and Georgia"*, and Shane Leslie, who observed: *"Wesleyan ministers, Methodist bishops, bear Irish names: Healy, Murphy, Connor. Their blood could only have come from Ireland… One of these Irish patriarchs… did meet a priest after fifty years, and could only present two grownup generations of Methodists."* If we take McWhiney’s thesis seriously, and he supplies us with enough evidence that we should, then the Old South should be regarded as a Celtic-derived New World outgrowth of the British and Irish regions that held out against Anglo-Saxon and Norman folkways, and of which the Irish contribution is a firm cornerstone to the Antebellum house. ### The Second Wave How, then, was all this forgotten? Naturally, the massive influx of the Irish in the nineteenth century—alongside the Anglowashing tendencies of historians mired in Protestant-American apologia—has been at least partly responsible for eclipsing the role of their eighteenth-century forebears in the foundation of the neophyte superpower. The sheer scale of arrivals fleeing destitution and starvation under Britain's rapacious and unilateral union assured some conflict between the newcomers and their hosts. They were almost entirely Catholic, and would not be as confessionally porous as those who left the island in the previous century. The Irish Catholics came to populate and command many districts of America's major cities, and proved politically astute and demographically robust enough to dominate the Democratic machines of those cities. On the martial front the themes of the eighteenth century re-emerged in the Civil War, with massive numbers of Irish and Irish-descended men fighting with distinction for both Union and Confederacy. Estimates of Irish-born men in the Union army run from around 150,000, or closer to 200,000 if the navy and regulars are included; those in Confederate service were between 20,000 and 40,000\. The Irish Brigade (the 63rd, 69th and 88th New York, later joined by the 28th Massachusetts and the 116th Pennsylvania) was organised and led by the Young Ireland exile Thomas Francis Meagher, and its fierce reputation became the symbol of this newest wave from Ireland, earning it a hard-fought place within the American story. In truth, this great 19th\-century migration, through no intention of its own, and via its own achievements and differentiation—and differentiation by American protestants of Irish descent—effected a near total eclipse of its Hibernian predecessors. ### The First Wave Remembered In sum, there can be no doubt that Ireland gave the New World not one, but two great waves of its children—three if one feels obliged to separate 17th and 18th centuries. The second, vast, Catholic and driven by famine, has proved the more enduring in popular memory, and its very scale has thrown the first into shadow. Yet, despite this trend, no honest student of America's formative eighteenth century can go far without encountering the deeds of that first Irish wave: in the muster rolls and the custom-house registers, in the Continental Congress's own appeal to Irish kinship, and in the complaints of British generals who knew exactly whom they were fighting. Since the 19th century, historiography has tended to read confessional boundaries as national ones, confusing rather than clarifying classifications, and ultimately downplaying the Irish input into colonial America. Of course, none of the points raised here requires jingoism, or subtracts from the English, Scots, or Germans’ profound input and impact on the peopling of and cultural path of early America. To portray America as Albion's seed may well be the truth of its dominant language, its common law and the shape of its first institutions, but it becomes a half-truth only when told as the whole: The story of American independence cannot be told without the Irish brawn and brain that aided it; the story of the Old South is incomplete without the Irish factor to its broader Celtic essence. When Kennedy stood at New Ross in 1963, he told the crowd that his great-grandfather had left Wexford for East Boston carrying with him two things, a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty. Are not the same values and desires to be found in the Carrolls, the Dongans and the Barrys of the 17th and 18th century elite, and the Kellys and the Murphys of the Continental line nearly two centuries before him? If St. Brendan was told that the land he glimpsed was not his to settle yet, to be kept yet for a later age, then that age first arrived in the ships of 17th and 18th century Belfast, Cork, Galway and Derry: the first of Hibernia's seed. ## **Bibliography** \[1\] O’Meara, John J., trans. *The Voyage of Saint Brendan* (*Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis*). Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1976. \[2\] Bradford, William. *Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647*. Edited by Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: Knopf, 1952. \[3\] Linehan, John. *Early Irish Settlers in Virginia*. \[4\] Akenson, Donald Harman. *The Irish Diaspora: A Primer*. Toronto: P.D. Meany, 1993 and 'Why the Accepted Estimates of the Ethnicity of the American People, 1790, Are Unacceptable,' The William and Mary Quarterly 41, no. 1, 1984, pp. 102-119): \[5\] O’Brien, Michael J. *A Hidden Phase of American History: Ireland’s Part in America’s Struggle for Liberty*. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1919. \[6\] Fischer, David Hackett. *Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America*. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. \[7\] U.S. Bureau of the Census. *A Century of Population Growth from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790–1900*. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909. \[8\] Purvis, Thomas L. “The European Ancestry of the United States Population, 1790.” *William and Mary Quarterly*, 3rd ser., 41 (1984): 85–101. \[9\] Miller, Kerby A. *Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America*. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. \[10\] Matheson, Robert E. *Special Report on Surnames in Ireland*. Dublin, 1909. \[11\] Galloway, Joseph. *The Examination of Joseph Galloway, Esq., by a Committee of the House of Commons*. London, 1779. \[12\] Lee, Henry. *Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States*. Philadelphia, 1812. \[13\] Patterson, Richard S., and Richardson Dougall. *The Eagle and the Shield: A History of the Great Seal of the United States*. Washington: Department of State, 1976. \[14\] Molyneux, William. *The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated*. Dublin, 1698. \[15\] Darcy, Patrick. *An Argument Delivered by Patrick Darcy*. Waterford, 1643. \[16\] McIlwain, Charles Howard. *The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation*. New York: Macmillan, 1923. \[17\] *Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789*. Vol. 2\. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905. \[18\] McWhiney, Grady. *Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South*. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988. \[19\] McDonald, Forrest, and Grady McWhiney. “The South from Self-Sufficiency to Peonage: An Interpretation.” *American Historical Review* 85 (1980): 1095–1118. \[20\] Berthoff, Rowland. “Celtic Mist over the South.” *Journal of Southern History* 52 (1986): 523–546.