Not Scots, and Barely British: Rethinking Ireland’s Founding Role in America

Terraformer is a commenter on Slugger. He works as a learning designer from Offaly and currently lives and works in Dublin. Here he argues that the story of Scots-Irish frontiersmen conceals a messier, more Irish, and less British truth.

Today is the 4^th July when Ireland and Northern Ireland will unite in commemorating the anniversary of the founding of the United States of America (officially the tongue-twisting “Semiquincentennial”). The America 250 Commission has granted both Northern Ireland and Ireland “special status” in its commemorative programme.

As no other countries seem to have sought or been awarded this status, and its awarding seems to have no discernible tangible effect, it’s hard not to see it as an essentially harmless bit of humouring of some star-struck sycophants by the US government. The Irish both sides of the border tend to have a fawning deference to the US of A.

After 9/11 Ireland held an official day of mourning, with schools, pubs and businesses around the country closed. Except for the US multinationals, of course. Money never stops. Since the 1950s the Irish government has secured a yearly official audience with the US president on St Patrick’s Day, complete with shamrock shenanigans.

In the north, Gordon Lyons’ department recently spent £5,500 on a fruitless bid to confirm US vice-president JD Vance’s Northern Irish roots. The irony of his department allocating £425,000 to commemorate Ulster-Scots involvement in a republican revolution against British rule has not been lost on detractors.

The American story is central to both states. The commonly accepted narrative is that Gaelic Catholic Irish moved en masse after the famine and settled in the east coast cities, whereas the Presbyterian Scots-Irish from Ulster moved en masse in the 18^th century in the decades prior to the American War of independence, settled in the rural south, especially Appalachia, and formed the backbone of America’s fight for freedom.

The narrative obscures as much as it illuminates. It overlooks the significant movement of Gaelic Irish in the 18^thcentury. While a figure of 250K Ulster-Scots Presbyterians migrating to the US in the 18^th century is routinely touted, this figure actually represents Irish emigration in total for the period.

In the colonial era, half of the ships leaving Irish ports for America left from the three southern provinces. It is probable the majority leaving from southern ports were Catholic, and Catholics would have formed a portion of those leaving from Ulster too.

The years 1771-1774 immediately prior to the Revolution saw a surge in migration. For these years historian Michael J O’Brien found there were more departures from the southern provinces than Ulster.

O’Brien’s research into the muster rolls of the Continental Army confirmed the historic underestimation of Gaelic Irish influence in the founding of America. He found thousands of undisputably Gaelic surnames among the Irish, who by the time of O’Brien’s research in the early 20^th century had been slyly co-opted into the more recently popularized Scotch-Irish appellation.

A snapshot of O’Brien’s finding gives insight into the historic omission: 695 Kellys, 322 Ryans, 221 Burkes, 494 Murphys, 266 Sullivans, 231 O’Briens, 73 Sheas.

A quick glimpse at the surnames of many of the American leaders and heroes during the war also attest to the oversight: Hercules Mulligan, John Barry, John Sullivan, Tim Murphy, Stephen Moylan, Henry McKean, Charles Carroll, Thomas Lynch, Edward Hand. John Shee, Gustavus Cunningham, Jeremiah O’Brien, John Fitzgerald, Arthur Dillon, Thomas FitzSimons.

Protestant for the most part by the time of the revolution, but definitely not Scots.

Viscount Mountjoy lamented to the Irish parliament following the United Kingdom’s defeat in 1784: “I am assured from the best authority the major part of the American Army was composed of Irish and that the Irish language was as commonly spoken in the American ranks as English.”

Historian David Noel Doyle’s research also found that southern and Gaelic Irish involvement in colonial America had been underestimated. Doyle noted that southern Irish Catholics were more likely to be single male indentured servants, while Ulster Protestant migration was more likely to involve whole families moving lock, stock and barrel. As the Gaelic Catholics did not have Catholic brides to perpetuate a Catholic Irish community, they converted and became absorbed into the prevailing Anglo-Saxon culture.

The American Council of Learned Societies in 1932 determined the 1790 American population to be 9.7% Irish, with 6% Ulster Irish (including Scots-Irish, Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Irish) and 3.7% Southern Irish (predominantly Gaelic). The southern Irish figure may underestimate Anglo-Irish migration from Leinster so could be higher. Overall, the Irish contribution to America is not as overwhelmingly Scots-Irish as has been portrayed in some quarters.

Both groupings suffered political and religious discrimination in Ireland under the Penal Laws. However, the main push factor was economic – export restrictions, droughts and rising rack rents that affected the wool and linen trade.

Both groupings were disproportionately involved in fighting against the British, with a minimum estimate of 25% of the army being Irish generally accepted.

For all the pride unionism takes in the Scots-Irish, the 18^th century migrants do not fit neatly into unionist narrative. They moved not just before Northern Ireland was created but before there was a political union at all.

They were labelled Irish on entry to America and for the most part seemed to accept that label, helping found Irish societies such as the Charitable Irish Society in 1737 and the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick in 1771, and voiced support for Irish causes. The sense of Britishness and British solidarity so intrinsic to unionist culture was not existent yet. The uncomplicated sense of Irishness no doubt was facilitated by a common Protestant faith among both Scots-Irish and Gaelic Irish in America.

The erasure of the Gaelic component can be attributed to the political arguments of the late 19^th century and early 20^thcentury in America and the United Kingdom. Nativist Americans sought to dispel the idea of their country being indebted in any way to the native Irish for its freedom in order to cast the incoming Catholic immigrants as thoroughly “alien” to America.

Irish unionists at the same time were endeavouring to promote a “two nations” theory of Ireland to undermine the case for Home Rule.  The Scotch-Irish Society of America, founded in 1889 by a recent immigrant from Antrim Colonel Thomas Wright, helped with these efforts.

While the Great Migration of the 18^th century is central to unionist hagiography, the emphasis tends to obscure later Protestant migration which occurred after the Act of Union.

From 1841 to 1911 about 450K Protestants departed Ireland, a number that surpassed 18^th century Protestant migration and also dwarfed emigration during the Irish revolutionary period. Protestant emigration in the 1820s and 1830s also ran into the hundreds of thousands.

This gets a lot less attention from unionists, in a similar way to how the earlier Gaelic impact on colonial America is overlooked by nationalists. Political expediency helps explain the difference in emphasis between the two persuasions.

The scale of 19^th-century Protestant migration is problematic to highlight for unionists as it occurred during the political union of Ireland with Britain. It serves to indict Westminster rule. The Great Wagon Train story of earlier, simpler times has a more mythic, uncomplicated resonance.

It is easier to overlook the specific political, economic and social complications of this more distant time and reduce the migrants to a vague bioessentialist archetype of “sturdy freedom-loving frontier people”. Starting in the late 19^th century, this historic group became a Rorschach diagram onto which a range of values and assumptions could be projected.

For their part, the Gaelic Irish Catholics who arrived in a great wave after the famine found no common cause with the descendants of Gaelic forebears of a century earlier who were now staunchly Protestant. The champions of the emerging nationalist Ireland that was heavily informed by Catholicism had little time to spend on a segment of the diaspora that had abandoned their religion.

Sources:

Report of the Committee on Linguistic and National Stocks in the Population of the United States. American Council of Learned Societies. 1932.

Irishmen In Our Revolution. The Sun. 16^th March 1919.

Irish Emigration to the American Colonies, 1723 to 1773. Chevalier W.H. Grattan Flood. Journal of the American Irish Historical Society. Volume XXVI. 1927.

A Hidden Phase of American History: Ireland’s Part In America’s Struggle for Liberty. Michael J O’Brien. 1919.

Review of Ireland, Irishmen and Revolutionary America, 1760-1820 by David Noel Doyle. Albion. Volume 13, Issue 3, 1981.

Yankee Doodle with a Brogue: The Irish in the American Revolution. Thomas Fleming. Irish America Magazine. 1998.

A Weaver by Trade – Irish Indentured Servants in Eighteenth-Century New Jersey. Paul Ferris. The New York Irish History Roundtable. 2014.

The Scotch-Irish & the Eighteenth-Century Irish Diaspora. Patrick Fitzgerald. History Ireland. Vol 7, No 3, 1999.

Northern Ireland signs memorandum of understanding marking ‘unique relationship’ with US. Irish America. 2025.

Ireland signs Memorandum of Understanding to support America’s 250th anniversary. Ireland.ie. 9th November 2025.

More than £5,500 in public money spent on JD Vance genealogy dossier – which failed to prove Ulster Scots heritage. Andrew Madden. Belfast Telegraph. 25th October. 2025.

DUP minister claims work on raising awareness of Ulster Scots links to US ‘bearing fruit’. Conor Coyle. Irish News. 17th March. 2026.

Irish Americans. Wikipedia.

Terraformer is a learning designer from Offaly, residing in Dublin.