The Glories of Ireland

by Unknown

In Austria the Irish soldiers were particularly welcome. They count forty-one field-marshals, major-generals, generals of cavalry, and masters of ordnance of Irish birth in the Austrian service. O'Callaghan relates that on March 17, 1766, His Excellency Count Mahony (son of the O'Mahony of Cremona), ambassador from Spain to the court of Vienna, gave a grand entertainment in honor of St. Patrick, to which he invited all persons of condition who were of Irish descent. Among many others, there were present Count Lacy, President of the Council at War, the generals O'Donnell, McGuire, O'Kelly, Browne, Plunkett, and MacElligot, four chiefs of the Grand Cross, two governors, several knights military, six staff officers, and four privy councillors, with the principal officers of State. All wore Patrick's crosses in honor of the Irish nation, as did the whole court that day. Emperor Francis I. said: "The more Irish officers in the Austrian service the better; bravery will not be wanting; our troops will always be well disciplined." The Austrian O'Reillys and Taaffes were famous. It was the dragoon regiment of Count O'Reilly that by a splendid charge saved the remnant of the Austrian army at Austerlitz.

In the American war of the Revolution, General Charles Geoghegan of the Irish Brigade made the campaigns of Rochambeau and Lafayette. He received the order of the Cincinnati from Washington and was ever proud of it. Lieutenant General O'Moran also served in America. He was afterwards executed in the French Revolution, for the "Brigade" remained royalist to the end. General Arthur Dillon, who served in the Brigade, was also guillotined in 1794, crying, "Vive le roi!" At the foot of the scaffold a woman, probably Mme. Hébert, also condemned, stood beside him. The executioner told her to mount the steps. "Oh, Monsieur Dillon," she said, "pray go first." "Anything to oblige a lady," he answered gaily, and so faced his God.

Lord Macaulay, commenting upon these things and deploring the policies that brought them about, says with great significance:

"There were Irish Catholics of great ability, but they were to be found everywhere except in Ireland—at Versailles, at St. Ildefonso, in the armies of Frederic, in the armies of Maria Theresa. One exile (Lord Clare) became a marshal of France, another (General Wall) became Prime Minister of Spain.... Scattered all over Europe were to be found brave Irish generals, dexterous Irish diplomatists, Irish counts, Irish barons, Irish knights of St. Louis and St. Leopold, of the White Eagle, and of the Golden Fleece, who if they remained in the house of bondage, could not have been ensigns of marching regiments or freemen of petty corporations."

The old Irish brigades ended with the French monarchy. Battalions of the regiments of Dillon and Walsh were with the French fleet in the West Indies at Grenada and St. Eustache, also at Savannah, and under Rochambeau at Yorktown, but, except as to the officers, the surviving regiments of Berwick, Dillon, and Walsh were largely French. With the better times under Grattan's Parliament in Ireland, the soldier emigration to France had all but ceased. The Irish Volunteers of 1782 numbered 100,000 men, of whom an appreciable proportion were Catholics. Many Irish went into the English army and navy, but there was another stream of fighting emigrants, that which flocked to the standard of revolt against England in America, of which much was to be heard thereafter.

In the American colonies before the Revolution there were thousands of descendants of the Catholic Irish who had settled in Maryland and Pennsylvania during the seventeenth century, as well as hardy Irish Presbyterians from Ulster, who came in great multitudes during the first half of the eighteenth century. They had suffered persecution in Ireland for conscience sake from their fellow-Protestants. In Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas they constituted entire communities. The emigration of the Catholic or purely Celtic Irish to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was often compulsory. At any rate, after the middle of the eighteenth century it was large and became continuous—a true drift. Catholics and Presbyterians alike brought hostility to the English government with them, and their voices fed the storm of discontent. The Irish schoolmasters, of whom there were hundreds, were especially efficient in this. They came in every ship to the colonies. They had no love for England, for they had experienced in Ireland the tyranny of English law, and they would be more than human if they did not imbue the minds of the American children under their care with their own hatred of oppression and wrong and English domination. The log schoolhouse of the Irish teacher became the nursery of revolution. They were a very important factor, therefore, in the making of the Revolution, and many of them took an active part as soldiers in the field.

The Irish, both Catholics and Protestants, poured into the patriot ranks once the standard of revolt was raised in 1775. The Pennsylvania line, which General Lee called "the line of Ireland," was almost entirely Irish, and the rosters of several of the Maryland and Virginia regiments contain a remarkably large proportion of Irish names, in some cases running as high as 60 per cent. It is computed that the Irish furnished not less than a third of the whole American forces. A common cause blotted out all old religious prejudices between Irishmen in the American service. It was John Sullivan, of New Hampshire, son of a Limerick schoolmaster, who began the revolt by seizing the fort of William and Mary and its storehouses filled with that powder which charged the guns at Bunker Hill in the following year. It was Captain Jeremiah O'Brien, with his brothers, who made the first sea attack on the British off Machias, Maine, in May, 1775, an engagement which Fenimore Cooper calls "the Lexington of the Seas." There were fifteen Celtic Irish names among the Minute Men at the Battle of Lexington. Colonel Barrett, who commanded at Concord, was Irish. There were 258 Celtic Irish names on the rosters of the American forces at the battle of Bunker Hill. John Sullivan had been made a major-general, thereafter to be a notable figure in the war at Princeton, Trenton, Newport, and in his Indian campaign. The Connecticut line was thick with Irish names. Around Washington himself was a circle of brilliant Irishmen: Adjutant-General Edward Hand leading his rifles, Stephen Moylan his dragoons, General Henry Knox and Colonel Proctor at the head of his artillery, John Dunlop his body-guard, Andrew Lewis his brigadier-general, Ephraim Elaine his quartermaster, all of Irish birth or ancestry. Commodore John Barry, born in Wexford in 1739 and bred to the sea, was a ship captain in his early twenties, trading from Philadelphia. When the Continental Congress met, he at once volunteered, and was given command of the Lexington, the first American ship to capture a British war vessel. Later, after gallant fighting on sea and land, he was given command of the U.S. frigate Alliance, in which he crossed the Atlantic to France, and fought and captured in a rattling battle two British warships, the Atlanta and the Trepasay. He was the Father of the American navy, holding captain's certificate No. 1, signed by Washington himself—the highest rank then issued.

General Richard Montgomery, the brave and able soldier who fell at Quebec as he charged the heights, was an Irishman. General George Clinton, son of an Irishman, was a brigadier-general, governor of New York and twice Vice-President of the United States. Fifty-seven officers of New York regiments in the Revolution were Irish, and a large number of the officers in the Southern regiments of the line, as well as of the militia, were native Irish or of Irish descent. The rosters of the enlisted Irishmen of the New York regiments run into the thousands. Hundreds of Irish soldiers suffered in the prison ships of New York, the horrors of which served so conspicuously to stimulate American determination to carry the war to the only rightful conclusion. Washington always recognized America's debt to the Irish. "St. Patrick" he made the watchword in the patriot lines the night before the English evacuated Boston forever on the memorable 17th of March, 1776. After the war he was made, with his own consent, an honorary member of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. Major-General Richard Butler and his four brothers, all officers, and Brigadier-Generals John Armstrong, William Irvine, William Thompson, James Smith, and Griffith Rutherford all fought with distinction. All of these officers were Irish-born. It was in truth an Irish war, so far as Irish sentiment and whole-hearted service could make it. The record of Irish soldiers' names alone would fill volumes.

The thirst of the Irish race for the glory of war is shown in the large enlistments in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and since, in the English army and navy. Grattan, in pleading for Ireland, claimed that a large percentage of the British forces were Irish. Wolfe Tone avers that there were 210 Irishmen out of 220 in the crew of a British frigate that overhauled his ship on its way to America. Bonaparte had in his armies an Irish Legion that did good service in Holland, Spain, Portugal, and Germany. Marshal Clarke, Duke of Feltre, French Minister of War in 1809, was Irish. Up and down the Spanish Peninsula, Irish blood was shed in abundance in the armies of Wellington. Never was more brilliant fighting done than that which stands to Irish credit from the lines of Torres Vedras to Badajos and Toulouse. Of the Waterloo campaign volumes have been written in praise of Irish valor. As Maxwell says in his Tales of Waterloo:—"The victors of Marengo and Austerlitz reeled before the charge of the Connaught Rangers." Wellington himself was Irish, as in the later wars of England Lord Gough, Lord Wolseley, Lord Roberts, Lord Kitchener, and General French came from Ireland. The Irish soldiers in the English service by a pitiful irony of fate helped materially to fasten the chains of English domination on the peoples of India in a long series of wars.

In America, the War of 1812 once more gave opportunity to the Fighting Race. The commanding figure of the war, which opened so inauspiciously for the United States, was General Andrew Jackson, the hero of the battle of New Orleans, and afterwards twice elected President of the United States. "Old Hickory", as he came to be lovingly called, was proud of his Irish father, and sympathized with the national longings of the Irish people. He was a splendid soldier, and his defeat of the English general, Pakenham, on January 8, 1815, which meant the control of the mouths of the Mississippi, as well as safeguarding the city of New Orleans, reflected the highest credit on his skill and unflagging energy. The English had superior numbers, between 8,000 and 9,000 men, against a scant 6,000 under Jackson, and their force was made up of veterans of the European wars. In command of the left of his line Jackson placed the gallant general William Carroll, born in Philadelphia, but of Irish blood, who was afterwards twice governor of Tennessee. The British general made the mistake of despising the soldier value of his enemy, yet before evening of that day he saw his artillery silenced and his lines broken, as he died of a wound on the field. The battle was actually fought after the signing of the treaty of peace at Ghent; it annihilated British pretensions in this part of the world, anyway.