And, if the devil had spread his net,
He could have made a glorious haul.”
The Puritans, in ridicule, said of these Irishmen that “they held as fast to their pint of doctrine as to their pint of rum.”
Thus was shown the relations existing between these Englishmen and Irishmen at that early period. Will this feeling of unfriendliness ever change? When the English people release Ireland from bondage and permit her to take such a position among the nations of the earth that Emmet’s epitaph can be written, then and not till then will the Irish people look with favor upon England and her government.
These Irish settlers were intensely anti-English long before that sentiment found violent expression in the War of the Revolution, in which they participated with such zeal and self-sacrifice. As recorded in the Peterborough town history, it was the attempts to establish the Church of England and to destroy the prevailing religious systems, so dear to the people, together with the oppressive land laws, that created in these Irish Presbyterians a hatred for the form of government under which they lived. In Ireland they were made by that church the objects of persecutions as mean, cruel and savage as any which have disgraced the annals of religious bigotry and crime. “Many were treacherously and ruthlessly butchered, and the ministers were prohibited, under severe penalties, from preaching, baptizing or ministering in any way to their flocks.”
And it is further stated that the “Government of that day, never wise in their commercial relations or their governmental affairs, began to recognize them only in the shape of taxes and embarrassing regulations upon their industry and trade. In addition to these restrictions, the landlords—for the people then as now did not own land, they only rented it—whose long leases had now expired, occasioned much distress by an extravagant advance of the rents, which brought the people to a degrading subjection to England; and many of them were reduced to comparative poverty.”
They would no longer submit to these wrongs, and “animated by the same spirit that moved the American mind in the days of the Revolution, resolved to submit to these oppressive measures no longer, and sought a freer field for the exercise of their industry and the enjoyment of their religion.” How like the present condition!
The sentiments of these people were the same as of the present emigrants from Ireland. They were composed in a very small part of Scotchmen, Englishmen and other nationalities, but the essential part of the pioneers of this section, in fact, nearly all of them, were Irishmen, for I assume that where men were born in Ireland, as they were, where many of their fathers, some of their grandfathers and great grandfathers were born, they were men who can unqualifiedly be called Irishmen.
Adopt any other standard and a large part of the inhabitants of Ireland at the time they emigrated would not be considered Irishmen, and probably few persons in this town today would be considered Americans.
These Scots (who, it must always be remembered, were of ancient Celtic origin) from whom the pioneers of this section trace their ancestry landed in Ireland, as the Londonderry, New Hampshire, history records it, in 1610, more than a century and a quarter before their descendants came to this country in 1736.