A friend of mine in a thriving Western city the other night met a man who is today one of the leading citizens in that place, and he said to my friend, “I am the sole survivor of five of my family who came over in those diseased and hellish ships in which England sent our people in the black days of the famine. My sister and my brother lie in the unfathomed caves of the Atlantic Ocean; my father and mother followed them. Twelve thousand of our race lie beneath the monument which the Ancient Order of Hibernians have erected on Groose Isle in the St. Lawrence below Quebec.”
And these unfortunate people, libelled before they landed, without means, without education, without knowledge of the people among whom they came, were not received with open arms. The resulting Anti-Irish feeling in the United States at that period has been most delicately and diplomatically pointed out by Mr. Dooley tonight. Men and women otherwise honest and unprejudiced stood appalled at the thought of nationally assimilating this wretchedness, and in that period the bitter prejudice against the Irish in America took root.
It was at this same time that American history began to take form, and the omissions, which are as criminal as some of the things they tell, crept into the books which our children read in school. And it is due to those omissions, Gentlemen, that this grand, painstaking and justice-seeking Society was formed.
If ever you want to get the white cock of Truth to crow over the Scotch-Irishman, take a look into the history of North Carolina. There is scarcely another state in America to which so many of the Northern Irish went before the Revolution as to North Carolina, and to no other state before the Revolution did so many Scotchmen go.
After the battle of Culloden, where the Scottish clans had so valiantly fought for Charles Edward, a number of them were given the privilege of leaving Great Britain and coming to America, first taking the oath of allegiance to the English crown. A great number of these broken clansmen came to North Carolina and they were there at the outbreak of the Revolution; but they had been preceded by a large number of Protestant Irishmen from the Province of Ulster.
If the Scotchman who went to Ireland in 1610, and from that until the seventeenth century, if he still remained obdurately a Scotchman, breaking the rule of all other races in Ireland, would he not have fraternized and made common cause with the Scotch people he met in the new world? On the contrary, when the Revolution broke out the broken clansmen, the MacDonalds, the MacNeils, the MacIntoshes, and even Flora MacDonald herself, the great heroine of story and song, became the most desperate loyalists and Torys in that state. They organized armies, they fought with courage and tenacity, and their leaders were guilty of horrible atrocities in putting down the Northern Irish, who were all patriots and Whigs and who are now called the “Scotch-Irish.”
The Irishmen in North Carolina, largely Presbyterians in religion, were unanimously patriotic as Americans from the beginning, and they did not assimilate with the Scotchmen, who came direct from Scotland. Flora MacDonald, whose story we all know, her five sons and her husband, entered the British Army and continued throughout the Revolution; that is, such of them as were not taken prisoners and expatriated to Nova Scotia, where her descendants are today most vigorous supporters of English rule. Her husband was early taken a prisoner of war and confined at Halifax, Virginia, and in 1776 Flora went back to Scotland, where she was afterwards rejoined by him.
To Worcester, Massachusetts, in the early Colonial days came three hundred Irishmen from the Province of Ulster, probably many from my own county of Donegal, to dwell among those ever hospitable and warm-hearted gentlemen, the Puritans. Here was a fine combination—a “Scotch Irish” Presbyterian meeting a Puritan, a Calvinistic Reunion! But how did they act when these three hundred men and women from Ulster arrived in Massachusetts? Perhaps some of you may think they were received with great hospitality. Well, they were not. They were received, says a “Scotch-Irish” historian, with marked aversion and bitter prejudice against them as being Irish. A gentleman writing in favor of the so called “Scotch Irish” in America says the New England colonists could not differentiate these Irish Protestants, though they were different in religion from the mass of Irishmen. Is not that a delicious confession in the papers of the Scotch Irish Society? The Puritans could not understand that they were anything but Irish; they recognized them as such and did everything to make it unpleasant for them (and they were artists in that work), and to get them out of the community as soon as they could, short of inviting a physical controversy, for looking at these stalwart Irishmen they made up their minds if it came to a fight, they could, in the language of the Bowery, put up a “peach” of a one. (Laughter and applause.)
The first man who died on the battlefield for American liberty, south of Mason and Dixon’s line, was a great “Scotch-Irish” Anglo-Saxon named John Grady; and when Grady died the captain of his army, Thomas Gove, a family well known to any Donegal man, took off his sword and deposited it with the body of Grady as a mark of respect and love for so brave and patriotic a man.
Now our great American historians, from Bancroft and Motley and Parkman down to Henry Cabot Lodge, have quietly ignored the Irish in America, or have given all the credit for their achievements to this myth, the “Scotch-Irishman.” It is a singular thing, when you read the things this Society puts before you, the absolute facts of history, that no American historian of Anglo-American ancestry has had the fairness and the courage and the sense of justice to do for Ireland what so many of them have done for other nationalities.