“The Irish have long been famed for their love of learning. By their missionaries they gave to the English the alphabet and the Christian faith. When the English made returns by breaking the Irish schools and destroying their libraries, they were still forced to recognize the talents of the people—‘sharp-witted lovers of learning, capable of any study to which they bend themselves,’ lovers of music, poetry and all kinds of learning.”
Bancroft says, in Volume 5, in referring to the Irish in 1763: “Their industry within the kingdom was prohibited or repressed by law, and then they were calumniated as naturally idle. Their savings could not be invested on equal terms in trade, manufactures or real property; they were called improvident. The gates of learning were shut on them and they were derided as ignorant. In the midst of privations they were cheerful. Suffering for generations under acts which offered bribes to treachery, their integrity was not debauched; no son rose against his father, no friend betrayed his friend. Fidelity to their religion, to which afflictions made them cling more closely, chastity, and respect for the ties of family remained characteristics of the down-trodden race.”
Gordon’s Civil War in Ireland speaks of the literature of Ireland as follows: “The literature of Ireland has a venerable claim to antiquity; for, as has been already mentioned, in the centuries immediately following the introduction of Christianity, many writers arose, whose works principally consist of lives of Saints, and works of piety and discipline, presenting to the inquisitive reader many singular features of the history of the human mind. The chief glory of the ancient Irish literature, arises from the revival of the rays of science, after it had almost perished in Europe, on the fall of Roman Empire in the west. The Anglo-Saxons, in particular, derived their first illumination from Ireland; and in Scotland, literature continued to be the special province of the Irish clergy, ’till the thirteenth century.”
Greece and Egypt, in very remote antiquity, were seminaries of learning to the rest of the world; and Ireland, in latter days, seems to have answered the same description to the other nations of Europe. When the ravages of the Goths and Vandals had desolated the improvements of Europe, and reached also to a considerable extent on the African continent, learning appears to have flourished in Ireland. Spencer says it is certain that Ireland had the use of letters very anciently, and long before England; he thought they were derived from the Phœnicians. Bede speaks of Ireland as the great mart of literature, to which they resorted from all parts of Europe. He relates that Oswauld, the Saxon King, applied to Ireland for learned men to instruct his people in the principles of Christianity. Camden says, it abounded with men of splendid genius, in the ages when literature was rejected everywhere else; according to him and others, who wrote at the same time, the abbeys Luxieu in Burgundy, Roby in Italy, Witzburg in Frankland, St. Gall in Switzerland, Malmsbury and Lindisfern in England, and Jona in Scotland, were founded by Irish Monks. The Younger Scaliger, and others, say, at the time of Charlemagne, and two hundred years before, almost all the learned were of Ireland. The first professors in the University of Paris were from this Island; and the great Alfred even brought professors to his newly founded college of Oxford from this country. It would be too tedious to enumerate the benefits diffused through various parts of Europe, by the numbers of distinguished and learned men from Ireland, who imparted the early lights of Science and of Christianity, and founded monasteries in various parts of Britain, France and Italy. At this day, the Patron Saints, as they are called, of several nations on the continent, are acknowledged to be Irish; hence we may see, how Ireland obtained the name of Sanctorum Patria. We have also the testimony of venerable Bede, that, about the middle of the seventh century, whole flocks of nobles and other orders of the Anglo-Saxons, retired from their own country into Ireland, either for instruction, or for an opportunity of living in monasteries of stricter discipline; and the Scots (as he styles the Irish) maintained them, taught them, and furnished them with books, without fee or reward; “a most honorable testimony,” says Lord Lyttleton, “not only to the learning, but likewise to the hospitality and bounty of that nation.” Dr. Leland remarks, “that a conflux of foreigners to a retired Island, at a time when Europe was in ignorance and confusion, gave peculiar lustre to this seat of learning; nor is it improbable or surprising, that seven thousand students studied at Armagh, agreeable to the accounts of Irish writers, though the seminary of Armagh was but one of those numerous colleges erected in Ireland, and the grand ruins of them, to this day, stand as so many learned monuments of the ancient and literary fame of the country. Ireland retained the name of Scotia, till so late as the fifteenth century, with the addition of Major, or Vetus, to distinguish it from Caledonia or Albania, that is, the present Scotland, which, in the eleventh century, began to be called Scotia Minor, as deriving its improvement immediately from hence. The ancient Scotch writers, of the greatest repute, are so far from denying their Irish extraction, that they seem to glory it; and King James I, in one of his speeches, boasts of the Scottish dynasty being derived from that of Ireland.”
The dazzling array of Irish names by which the annals of America has been graced is far more extensive than the ordinary observer would suppose.
To some of the friendly and to all of the unfriendly a man to be Irish must bear a pronounced Celtic name.
It is a fact from the most reliable authority that many Irish on coming to this country adopted English names, many taking the names of colors and trades. Dr. Thomas Dunn English says “they often took the names of Black, Brown, Grey and Green, or as fancy may dictate.” He says “the names were generally retained on this side of the Atlantic.” He also adds: “In the eighteenth century as well as the latter part of the seventeenth century, Philadelphia, then the greatest commercial port, was the spot of the greatest debarkation of the Irish hosts. While many remained in the east there was a time when the greatest portion pushed their way into the western wilds where the land could be had for the asking. They scattered themselves over the slopes of the great Allegheny range and its various spurs and tributaries.”
From Londonderry in New Hampshire down to Coloraine in the far south, Dr. English says he found many Celtic names changed with the “Macs” and “O’s” dropped. He said: “If nevertheless all these names were blotted out and their place taken by those of English or German sound the character of the original settlement would be known by the prevalence of certain words and survival of certain customs.”
Spencer, the historian, says: “Multitudes of laborers and husbandmen from Ireland embarked for the Carolinas. The first colony of these located in 1737 near Santee.” He also says “emigration to America was so heavy as to show the depopulation of whole country districts in Ireland.” Ramsey, the historian of the Carolinas, declares “that of all the European countries none has furnished this province with so many inhabitants as Ireland. Scarcely a ship,” he says, “sailed from any Irish port for Charlestown that was not crowded.” All this, he declares, occurred years and decades before the revolutions.
Jenkins, in his life of President Polk, says: “About the year 1735 two large parties from Ireland sought the wilds of America, one by the Delaware to Philadelphia and the other by Charlestown, South Carolina.”