When the soldiers of Lafayette were half naked and starving, the Irish people of Baltimore, then a place of only one hundred homes, gave them food and clothing. In 1780, when the finances of the struggling republic were at the lowest ebb, when it took from $30 to $50 in paper to make $1 in specie, after our soldiers had suffered at Valley Forge and elsewhere, the business men of Philadelphia raised 315,000 lbs. sterling and gave it to Congress. Twenty-seven Irishmen of that city contributed 103,500 pounds of that amount. They were members of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, which gave 399 officers of the highest rank to the city, state and nation during its early history. Washington became an honorary member of that patriotic organization.
When our country so badly needed assistance, Bishop Carroll accompanied Benjamin Franklin to France to seek the aid of that country. It was secured. History gives Franklin the credit, but does not mention the name of Bishop Carroll, who really made the mission a successful one. Bishop Carroll also accompanied Franklin to the French Canadian provinces for a similar purpose.
There were twelve Irish delegates to the convention that adopted the Constitution, and there were five Irishmen in the first United States Senate of twenty-two members.
Dr. Hugh Knox educated Alexander Hamilton, who was a poor boy. Doctor Knox was a big-hearted Irishman. It was Matthew P. Lyon, an Irishman, who was sold as a slave in Connecticut when a mere boy, who, on the thirty-sixth ballot, as a congressman from Vermont, later in life, cast the deciding vote that elected Thomas Jefferson president of the United States over Aaron Burr.
Many who came with the French to assist the Americans were sons of Irishmen, who had been driven to France with Patrick Sarsfield after the treachery of the British at Limerick in 1691.
From 1691 to 1791, over 400,000 different Irishmen served in the French army. When the Revolutionary War broke out, they petitioned the French War Department to come to America to fight their national foes. There were entire Irish regiments in the French army when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. A young Irishman, Robert Wilson, was appointed to take charge of the surrendered flags and the news of the great victory was sent in haste to President Thomas McKean, of the Continental Congress at Philadelphia. McKean was one of the foremost Irish Americans of his time.
Molly Pitcher and Nancy Hart, two Irish women who participated in the Revolutionary War, deserve rank with the greatest heroines in history.
The Irish were among the leading educators, journalists, theologians, historians, scientists, canal constructors, and railway builders of the decades subsequent to the Revolutionary War. They were leaders in laying substantially the broad foundation for our material, educational and moral greatness. They gave us such statesmen as James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, James K. Polk, and many others, who were among the very ablest national leaders in the early history of our republic.
I shall not refer to the part the Irish took in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the great Civil conflict, or the Spanish-American struggle for supremacy. All I ask is for you to reflect on their great fight for liberty from 1775 to 1783—that struggle that has been felt around the world—and to tell the facts to your children, to your friends, and to your fellow citizens, for they will not, for some unknown reason, find it in ordinary histories. I can do no better than to quote, in closing, the words of Colonel John Parke Custis, the adopted son of General Washington:
“Then honored be the old and good services of the sons of Erin in the war of independence. Let the shamrock be entwined with the laurels of the Revolution; and truth and justice, guiding the pen of history, inscribe on the tablets of American remembrance: ‘Eternal gratitude to Irishmen.’”