New York World’s History of the United States says: “An Irish colony under Ferguson settled in South Carolina in 1679.”
There was a combined movement of Celts, Catholic and Presbyterian and Quakers to South Carolina and of all the colonies sent out by the prolific isle none had greater Americans than the emigration between 1750–’70.
At any rate it may challenge comparison with any other—Jackson, Calhoun, O’Kelly, O’Grady, Polk, Crockett, Houston, McDuffie, Adair, McKemy, McWorter, O’Farrell, McNairy. All these are of Irish extraction and still (some of them Americanized by dropping the O’ or the Mc) adorn the annals of their states or nation. If anyone had said, in 1692, that a British parliament could succeed in exiling thousands of Catholic and Protestant Irish in such a way as to make them fight side by side with Catholic Frenchmen and non-sectarian colonists against the United Kingdom he would have been denounced as a fool. The wise men would have told him that legislative folly might do wonders, but it could not work miracles. Yet that is just what parliament accomplished, for scarcely was the ink dry on the treaty of Limerick (which provided that Catholics should enjoy in Ireland such rights as they had enjoyed in the reign of Charles II) when it was violated by a series of laws that now make honest Englishmen blush. It is needless to repeat the black details. Says one British writer: “The laws were so many and so atrocious that an Irishman could scarcely draw a full breath without breaking a law.”
Grimshaw’s History of the United States, 1821, says: “Philadelphia in 1683, which was begun on the site of the Indian village, Coquanoc, derives its name from a city in Asia Minor celebrated in sacred history for its having been the seat of an early Christian church. During the first twelve months of its foundation about a hundred houses were erected and, since that period, it has received a continual accession of inhabitants from Ireland and Germany.” It also says: “In the interval between 1730 and the period when this history will relinquish the distinct colonial proceedings to conduct the narrative of a more sublime and awful period when individual interests combine and move forward with a unity of action there was an annual influx of emigrants. These were principally from Germany and Ireland. The Irish and German people at an early day brought the useful arts and manufactures into Pennsylvania. The Irish and French emigrants had enjoyed a large share of civil liberty and boldly contended for total enfranchisement from regal domination.”
Grimshaw says, in relating an incident of the war of 1812: “Scenes of the most distressing kind were occurring in the Chesapeake. It was now that Admiral Cockburn was satiating his unmanly and unsoldierlike propensities in a species of warfare at once reflecting dishonor. At first his depredations were directed against the farm houses and seats of private gentlemen. These were plundered, their owners in the rudest manner insulted, and cattle which could not be removed were wantonly destroyed.
“Georgetown and Fredericktown were destroyed. The people of Frenchtown, after firing a few shots, fled on the enemy’s approach with the exception of an old Hibernian, named O’Neil. This heroic citizen continued the battle alone, loading a piece of artillery and firing it himself, until, by recoiling, it ran over his leg and wounded him severely; and even then, exchanging his piece of ordnance for a musket, and limping away, he still kept up a retreating fight with the advanced column of the British. He was, at length, made prisoner, but soon afterwards released.” Holmes (Annals of America) says: “From Dec. 31, 1728, to Dec. 31, 1729, there entered the port of Philadelphia 5,655 Irish immigrants, 243 Germans, 267 English and Welsh and 43 Scotch.”
Rev. S. F. Hotchkin, in Penn’s Greene Country Towne, writes: “In 1729 Miss Elizabeth McGawley, an Irish lady, brought hither tenantry to the Dickson property between Nicetown and Frankford and had a chapel there. A priest named Michael John Brown was buried in a stone enclosure not far away. Roman Catholic services may be traced, as Watson says, to a letter of Penn to Logan, in 1708, wherein he mentions that Mass had been celebrated in Philadelphia and that the services were held in a frame building on Cor. of Front and Walnut Sts.”
The New York Sun, in commenting on Galletin, says his sponsors were John Smilie, Blair McClenachan, and Thomas McKean, sturdy leaders of the strong Philadelphia Irish colony of that era, 1789.
John Sanderson’s Biography (1823) of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, says: “In Pennsylvania the Quakers reared the most durable monuments of their fame, and advanced of their most elevated grade the interests of their order. The freedom, liberality and benevolence of their policy invited among them, as well from the adjacent provinces as from Europe, a numerous population; and the industry of the German, the activity and enterprise of the Irishman joined to the pre-existing order and economy of this province, raised it to a sudden height of prosperity which has been seldom equalled in the history of nations.”
Drake, in his Landmarks of Boston, says: “About 1718 a number of colonists arrived from Londonderry, Ireland, bringing with them the manufacture of linen and the implements used in Ireland.”