The Lost Tribes of the Irish in the South / An Address at the Annual Dinner of the American Irish Historical Society, January 6, 1917

by Irvin S. Cobb

The records show that nearly three-fourths of that dauntless little band who under the leadership of George Rogers Clark, an Irishman, waded through the floods to take Vincennes and thereby won all the great northwest territory away from the British and gave to the American colonies what to-day is the richest part of the United States, where Irishmen—not Scotch-Irish, nor English-Irish, but plain Irish-Irish men who were rebels and patriots by instinct and born adventurers by reason of the blood which ran in their veins.

The first settlement of English-speaking Catholics beyond the Allegheny Mountains was not located in the north but in the south, and in my own State of Kentucky at that. It endures to-day, after having given to this country one of its greatest and most scholarly churchmen, Bishop Spaulding. (Applause.) The children of the pioneers of Kentucky, almost without exception, learned their first lessons in log cabins under the teachings of that strange but gifted race of men, the wandering Irish schoolmasters, who founded the old field schools of the South and to whom the South is largely indebted for the seeds of its culture.

Irishmen from Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland bore the brunt of the western campaigns in 1812 against the British. Irishmen from Kentucky fell thick at the disastrous battles of the Thames, and the Raison, and their Irish bones to-day rest in that ground sanctifying it and making of it an American shrine of patriotism. It was the hand of a Kentucky Irishman, Colonel Richard Johnson, afterwards Vice-President of the United States, that slew the great Tecumseh. A good share of the Kentucky and Tennessee riflemen who at New Orleans stood behind Andy Jackson’s cotton bale breastworks, mowing down Packenham’s Peninsular Veterans and making their red coats redder still with the life blood of those invaders, were Irishmen, real Irishmen. They proved their Irish lineage by the fact that they fell out and quarreled with Old Hickory, because he denied them all the credit for winning the fight, and he quarreled back, for he was by way of being an Irishman himself. (Laughter and applause.)

It was a Kentucky Irishman, Dr. Ephraim McDowell, who performed the first operation for ovariotomy—performed it on a kitchen table with a mad husband standing over him with a drawn revolver, threatening to shoot him if his wife died under the knife. But he went ahead and it was a successful operation, and it has brought relief and life and sanity to millions of women all over the world. It was a Kentucky Irishman and a soldier, Theodore O’Hara, who penned perhaps the most beautiful lyric poem, and certainly the sweetest tribute to the brave in our language, the immortal “Bivouac of the Dead.” It was another Kentucky Irishman, the saintly poet-priest, Father Ryan, whose hand wrote those two fondest poems in memory of the Lost Cause, “The Conquered Banner” and “The Sword of Robert E. Lee.”

In the Civil War it was a Kentuckian of Scotch and Irish descent who led the North—Abraham Lincoln—and it was another Kentuckian of mingled Irish and Scotch blood—Jefferson Davis—who was President of the Confederacy.

The historian Collins said the five greatest lawyers Kentucky ever produced were Barry, Rowan, Haggin, Breckenridge, and Bledsoe—four Irish names and one Indian name—and yet these five have been called Anglo-Saxons, too.

What is true of Kentucky is to a greater or less degree true of the rest of the South. It was an Irish Virginian, Patrick Henry, who sounded the first keynote of the American Revolution, and who at the risk of his life, by his words paved the way for the Declaration of Independence. The South Carolina Irishman, John C. Calhoun, first raised the slogan of Nullification, and it was another Irishman, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, who swore by the Eternal to hang him higher than Haman if he carried out his plan.

To-night you have heard a tribute, and a deserved one, to little Phil Sheridan of the North, but I want to couple his name with that of a Southern Irishman, the son of an Irish refugee, Pat Cleburne of Arkansas, one of the most gallant leaders that the Civil War produced. (Applause.) Pat Cleburne died on one of the bloodiest battlefields of Christendom in his stocking feet because as he rode into battle that morning he saw one of his Irish boys from Little Rock tramping barefooted over the frozen furrows of a wintry cornfield and leaving tracks of blood behind him. So he drew off his boots and bade the soldier put them on, and fifteen minutes later he went to his God in his stocking feet. Raleigh laid down his coat before Good Queen Bess, and has been immortalized for his chivalry, but I think a more courtly deed was that of the gallant Irishman, Pat Cleburne. For one was kowtowing before royalty and the other had in his heart only thoughtfulness and humanity for the common man afoot.

Sam Houston, the first President of the Lone Star State, was a Tennessee Irishman. Irish through and through, and the present President of the United States, a Southerner also, is half Irish. One of the most distinguished members of the Supreme Court in recent years was a Kentucky Irishman, John M. Harlan, and to-day two of the men who sit on that tribunal are Irishmen—White of Louisiana, the distinguished and honored Chief Justice, and McReynolds of Tennessee.

(Voice) How about McKenna?