jmm@bonnie.UUCP (Joe Mcghee) (07/04/84)
Contemporary accounts of America by both visitors and combatants during the Revolutionary War make frequent references to the significant numbers of Irish to be found in the American Armies. Thus, Ambrose Serle, Confidential Agent to the British Cabinet, in a report of 1776 to Dartmouth, then Secretary of State, stated that "great numbers of emigrants, particularly Irish, are in the Rebel Army, some by choice and many for mere subsistence". He went on to recommend that in the future, Irish convicts should not be transported to America, for there they exchanged "ignominy and servitude for a share of honour and ease!" A companion of the Marquis de Chastellux, a major general of Rochambeau's army, remarked in 1787 of the Irish that "whilst the Irish emigrant was fighting the battles of America by sea and land, the Irish merchants....laboured with indefatigable zeal...to increase the wealth and maintain the credit of the country; their purses were always open, and their persons devoted to the common cause. On more than one occasion, Congress owed their existence and America her preservation, to the fidelity and firmness of the Irish". An American Loyalist, Dr. John Berkenhaut, in his observation on a journey from New York to Philadelphia in 1778, noted that most of the American Army appeared to consist of "Irish transports" and officers also from Ireland, an aggregate which he described as "a contemptible body of vagrants, deserters and thieves". The views alike of American Loyalists and English commanders as to their opponents bear further testimony to the numbers of Irish fighting on the side of the Colonies. Before a Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry held in 1779, Major General Robertson, under questioning from Edmund Burke, gave as his opinion that the majority of Washington's Army were not Americans, and went on "I remember General Lee telling me that he believed half the Rebel Army were from Ireland". When asked to clarify this, he stated, "I mean the Continental Army." (The Lee in question was Major General Charles Lee, at one time Washington's second-in-command, who had been captured by the British during the winter of 1776.) General Clinton, in a letter of October 23, 1778 to Lord Germain, Secretary of War, remarked that extremely difficult to carry out the Government's Directive to in some way siphon off the emigrant element from the American Army since "the emigrants from Ireland were in general to be looked upon as our most serious antagonists," having fled from oppression "real or fancied" to a country where "they could live without oppression and had estranged themselves from all solicitude of the welfare of Britain". In Morgan's Regiment of riflemen, the muster rolls for November 1778 show that 162 out of 415 men were born in Ireland. From a "size roll" of the First Pennsylvania Regiment of Foot, 315 out of 680 were shown as Irish born. Among selected companies in the Seventh Pennsylvania Regiment are four where the percentages of Irish-born soldiers varied from 64% to 76%. In the Eleventh Pennsylvania Regiment, companies of Irish-born ranged from 40% to 65%. Irish-born generals included Generals Hogan, Butler, Montgomery, Irvin Hand, Greaton, Thompson, Maxwell and Lewis. A number of other generals were of Irish ancestry including Generals Henry Knox, Anthony Wayne and John Sullivan. There was no American Navy in the modern sense of the word, but rather a number of independently operating privateers supplemented later by ships bought and built by Congress on a piecemeal basis, many of which included significant numbers of Irish seamen. Irish-born Commodore John Barry was the most famous of these. He was later awarded Commission Number One of the United States Navy. Speaking in Parliament in 1784, Luke Gardiner, Lord Mountjoy, said: "America was lost by Irish emigrants. These emigrations are fresh in the recollection of every gentleman in the House. I am assured from the best authority, the major part of the American Army was composed of Irish and that the Irish language was as commonly spoken in the American ranks as English. I am also informed it was their valor determined the contest so that England had America detached from her by force of Irish emigrants."