assimilation had been desired, and the possibility of the Irish
eventually assimilating their not entirely voluntary hosts were
questions that deeply moved men of earnest convictions, but perhaps of
limited vision.
Unfortunately, it was just about this epoch that histories of an
ambitious and standard character began to be written, and some taking on
the passions of the time and the prejudices of the author’s environment,
have not given the Irish the place that their services and devotion to
the country’s welfare entitled them to hold. It is further to be
deplored that full recovery from the bitterness of those days has not
been hastened by incidents growing out of political and other
conditions.
Even today, when calm, cold reason has had had time to resume her sway,
it is largely magazine writers who are delving into the historic past,
and presenting to the people a panorama of national life which displays
upon its unfolding roll, not only the original settlers and their
descendants, but also the pioneer Irish and their sons who had their
part in the upbuilding and maintenance of the nation. But the healing
touch of time will change, let us hope, if it does not entirely cure,
that obliquity of vision which distorts much that it sees or fails to
see that which it may not distort.
When some full, adequate chronicle comes to be written of the Irish race
movement to this country due consideration will be given to the
influence it has had on the manners and customs of the country, and it
will not be complete if it takes not into account the contributions of
brawn and brain, labor and energy that it has given to our national
progress.
The versatility of talent and the buoyancy of spirit and the native wit
and humor which distinguish this people, have diffused themselves
through American life and infused themselves into it, softening its
severe, rigid lines, and helping to lift the gloom, that often concealed
the splendid qualities of the Puritan whose spirit has spread over the
land carrying to its uttermost limits the blessings of self government
and radiating an influence for the uplift of mankind.
While I am on this subject, permit me to digress for a moment, to speak
of a thing which is, perhaps, outside the range of this paper, and that
is the insensible, subtle change that I believe the Irish have wrought
in our Eastern section in the voice and accent of the descendants of the
first settlers. The sharp nasal tone, so common half a century ago, has
almost entirely disappeared in the cities and is fast disappearing in
the country. This is probably due in great measure to the fact that most
of the immigrant Irish brought with them the rich, rare brogue of their
fatherland, and the others the cultivated voice of the educated
Irishman, both full of music and “sweet as the dying note of a broken
harp string”—a music, whose soft, pervasive tones have added an
indescribable charm to the spoken word that the stern hills of New
England rarely knew, but which in time they have felt the touch of.
Today it is difficult to tell the origin of the speaker, whether he be a
tenth generation Puritan or a second generation Irish, in communities
where the latter abound.
The scope of this paper is general and not personal, and for that reason
I have not gone through the gamut of names of Irish origin whose owners
merited well of the country. Their fame is secure and permanent—and
while in some instances overshadowed and lost sight of through the
neglect, or let us call it the caprice, of the historian—it is safe.
Its single purpose has been to fathom the causes of the total or partial
eclipse of a great body of people whose achievements entitle them to
shine among the greater or lesser luminaries of this Republic, if not
among the greatest.
To repair the injustice and the cruel omissions of history, is a noble
mission and as patriotic as any that ever moved men to deeds of valor
and sacrifice. It is not for us to keep alive the memory of those who
have their place in the imperishable annals of our country—but it is for
us to rescue from oblivion the men that lived and worked and wrought,
whom historical writers by accident, indifference or design, have
ignored in their researches, or buried in a foot note at the bottom of a
page.
If we do this, we do not come together in vain.
PRESIDENT-GENERAL QUINLAN: This “squib” appeared in last night’s paper,
and was handed to me this afternoon: “The man who writes a poem does so
under reasonably safe conditions. Nothing more dangerous than a
bean-blower is apt to be used against him; lemons and vegetables may
come his way, but this is the worst, save the scorn of the critics. But
the McDonalds and McAdoos lived in the underground; they met irate
landlords and the general ‘cussedness’ of inanimate things, all with
smiling patience and invincible courage.”
The McDonalds and the McAdoos are famous in the annals of Irish history.
Some of the McAdoos have lived and toiled under the ground; others have
existed in the open. From the humblest walk of life to the highest
position, next to the chamber of the Executive, one of your officials
has risen. It is like naming a member of his own household to his family
to present your illustrious ex-President-General, Hon. William McAdoo.
(Applause.)
HON. WILLIAM MCADOO: Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, I fear that
sometimes many of the elements that go to make up the very cosmopolitan
population of our country think that we of the American-Irish Historical
Society are too insistent upon the part which our people played in the
formative period of the Republic.
Now we have an affectionate feeling towards our Motherland because she
much needs the help of her children. If Ireland were a great and
powerful country, like Germany, rich with an army and navy of its own,
with its ambassadors and representatives in every land and with its
great universities spreading German ideas among the people; if Ireland
had all those accessories she would have made her claims felt in the
history of the United States without the need of societies like this;
but Ireland, “Erin, the isle of sorrows,” is an unfortunate country,
subjugated, impoverished, despoiled and misrepresented and when,
therefore, the membership of this Society, these gentlemen who have
given to it such unselfish labor, discovered the errors and mistakes and
the indifference and sometimes the prejudices of historians of the
United States in regard to Ireland in America, as so well pointed out by
Mr. Dooley, they organized this Society for the purpose of doing justice
to those brave Irish men and virtuous women who came here, especially
prior to the Revolution, and who did so much to make this a great and
free country.
Now the trouble with most of us Irish Americans—I am Irish in the first
degree, having been born in Ireland while most of you are probably only
second-class Irish or even third or fourth—is that when we are serious
and in deep earnest we are taken to be play acting, and when we are
jocose or humorous and contributing to the “gaiety of nations” we are
taken to be most in earnest. It is hard for an Anglo-Saxon to understand
an Irish Celt. One of the greatest difficulties between England and
Ireland is the fact that the mental attitude of the two races is far
apart, the intellectual agility of the one and the slow, if certain,
processes of the other are obvious to any one acquainted with both
countries. Let me illustrate it by a little story:
There was a party at an English country house, and they had been passing
a rather dull English winter afternoon by proposing and guessing at
riddles; and finally one of the guests turned to the host and said, “Sir
Charles, why don’t you propose a riddle?” He said, “Really, now, I’m not
half clever enough to do such a thing as that. I couldn’t really do it,
don’t-cher-know.” “Well, you might try; you don’t know what you can do.”
Finally Sir Charles said, “Well, it stands on one leg and it has
feathers and it barks like a dog.” So they all guessed and guessed,
everything in the animal and vegetable kingdom, and they finally gave it
up; and Sir Charles said, “Why, really, I had no idea I was so clever; I
thought you would easily guess it”; and they said, “It is impossible to
guess.” And he said, “Well, that’s easy; it’s a stork.” “Well,” they
exclaimed, “but surely, Sir Charles, a stork doesn’t bark.” And Sir
Charles replied, “Well, that’s the cleverest part of it; I put that in
to make it hard.”
And when we come to our Scotch friends we can readily understand how
hard it is for a Scotchman to thoroughly comprehend an Irishman. A
friend of mine was telling this story in Glasgow to the Board of Trade
at its annual dinner: He said an Irishman was coming down the Bowery in
New York late one night and met a policeman, and he said to him, “What
time is it?” and the policeman replied, “It’s two o’clock.” And the
Irishman said, “I’m a bit deaf and I didn’t hear you; would you mind
repeating it?” and the policeman yelled at him, “It’s two o’clock.”
“Very queer,” says the Irishman, “but really I didn’t hear you. Would
you mind saying it again?” and thereupon the policeman (one of my former
companions in arms) took his constitution-preserving stick and hit him
on one side of the head and said “One,” and then he hit him a clip on
the other side of the head and said “Two.” “Did you hear me that time?”
“I did, begorra, and I’m glad I didn’t meet you at twelve.”
A friend of mine, a Scotchman by descent, told that story to the Glasgow
Board of Trade, and there sat those Scotchman in solemn black around the
festive board, and there wasn’t a smile in the room. And finally one old
Scotchman, by way of defending the storyteller, said, “Weel, now, I
dinna blame the policeman so much; it’s very aggravating to be asked the
same question so often.”
Now this Society was formed, among other things, for the purpose of
clearing up the underbrush in American history, or, in other words,
“laying” the Scotch-Irish ghost. (Applause.)
There was a ghost in my native county of Donegal called the “Fanad
Ghost.” It was said to have been raised by a free mason skilled in the
“Black Art” while in an hilarious mood, but after it was up the mason
couldn’t put it down and the ghost began throwing things around—the
delft on the dresser, the noggins, the pots, the stones on the
chimney—pulling out the scobes in the thatch on the roof, and raising
Cain generally. The Presbyterian minister came in and prayed until he
had corns on his knees, and the ghost took a day off. The Catholic
priest was called in and did the best he could, and the ghost acted
“dacintly” for two days, at the end of which time he was more vigorous
than ever. Well, finally they sent to the city of Derry and got a
delegation of free masons, and they labored one week, night and day—with
refreshments—and at last one morning, when the refreshments were running
low, the head mason came to the door with perspiration streaming off his
face and his legs wobbly, and said, “Get a black cock without a white
feather and another keg of Charley Oge’s poteen, and with the help of
Heaven we’ll lay him before morning.” And as the last crow went of the
cock and the last drop out of the keg the Fanad Ghost was laid forever
with a whiff of sulphur up the chimney and a trembling of the kitchen
floor. (Laughter and applause.)
And so this Society is looking for the white cock of Truth to crow soon
over the Scotch-Irish ghost, for if ever there was a veritable ghost it
is the Scotch-Irishman in America. (Applause.)
The “Scotch-Irishman” in America, Mr. Dooley has told us, had his
historic origin about the time of the great famine period in Ireland,
when almost one-half of the inhabitants of that unfortunate land,
starved, diseased and in rags, were huddled in cargo ships and treated
worse than any negro slaves that ever came to this country. They died by
thousands and strewed the bottom of the Atlantic with their bodies.
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.
Mr. Motley wrote a whole library about the Dutch Republic, constituting
a standard work among the Dutchmen of today of the history of their
people and achievements. Mr. Parkman’s history of the French in Canada
is unexcelled. Even that good historian, Mr. John Fiske, never rose
above his environment; and I say it is no credit to American historians
of the highest class that they have not seen fit to do justice to the
patriotism, the sacrifices, the intellectual efforts and the financial
contributions which the great body of the Irish people made to secure
liberty to the United States. (Applause.)
Wouldn’t it have been a splendid and a generous thing if Motley had
written a little of Ireland as he wrote of the Dutch Republic and the
New Netherlands; if Parkman had done for Ireland in this country what he
did for the French in Canada? And yet, from the earliest times, there
came an unending stream to this country from Ireland of the cream of its
chivalry and virtue, courage, industry and intellect, and sacrificed it
most generously and without hope of reward at the altar of American
liberty. (Applause.)
But the “Scotch-Irishman,” as considered, let us look at him. Now we
will never understand the history of the Irish in America unless we go
back to Ireland. I have a lot of friends among Americans of other stocks
who undertake to appreciate the part the Irish have played in the
upbuilding of this nation, but they can’t estimate it correctly unless
they know something of the history of Ireland itself.
Every race that came to Ireland was assimilated. The Danes came, and
those not driven to sea quickly became converted to Irish ideas. The
Normans came, and they, too, became assimilated; and the Scotchmen came
to Ireland, to the Plantation of Ulster, a subject too broad to be
discussed now.
Commencing in 1610 and from that on to the end of the seventeenth
century, the Scotchman came to Ireland, and he hadn’t been there long
before he became civilized, smoothed, rounded, the heart of him given
free play—in equality with the head; he joined the revolutionary
societies such as the Irish had in those days, took pot shots at the
landlord, and cultivated a sense of humor, conspired against English
rule, and, coming to America, became a most bitter Rebel and a valiant
soldier in Washington’s army.
Now I intend, at the request of your worthy Ex-President, Mr. Crimmins,
who has done so much for this Society, to prepare some facts with
reference to the settlement of Ulster, and what the immigrants from
Ulster did in America, especially in the Revolutionary War. And I assert
tonight, without fear of contradiction from any historian, American or
English, that the blundering, unjust and criminal acts of England in
Ireland, and especially in the province of Ulster, did more to fill the
armies of George Washington with brave soldiers than almost any other
cause. (Applause.)
If I were asked to point out one single thing that did more to make sure
American liberty than any other, I would speak of the tithing of the
Presbyterians in the province of Ulster. When this colony had been
planted in Ulster on the “confiscated” lands of the O’Donnells and
O’Neils and other septs, when these brave, intellectual, industrious,
independent Scotch Celts (for that is what the large majority of them
were) brought over to settle this province under promises not kept—and
in this connection it should be remembered that these settlers had no
part in the conspiracy of Sir Arthur Chichester and Sir John Davies and
other English “Civilizers” and land grafters in despoiling the
O’Donnells and O’Neils and minor Irish septs of 3,000,000 acres of the
best land in Ulster—were confronted with the test oath of Queen Anne
applied to Catholics and Presbyterians alike, when they were compelled
to pay tithes, the same being taken from their fields of wheat or the
corn from their barn, to support a church into which they would not
enter in common with their Catholic fellow countrymen, upon emigrating
to this country they became American Rebels on every battlefield in the
United States. They came to the States before the Revolution in such
numbers that in one year twelve thousand Ulster Presbyterian Irish left
that province for American ports. The flow of immigration was so
continued and so great in volume that it is a matter of record, which
anyone can read in the State Papers, that the Presbyterian ministers of
the province of Ulster petitioned the King to stop the immigration by
repeal of obnoxious laws and alien injustice, or they would have no
congregations left in Ireland.
You can trace them today from Londonderry, N. H., and Dublin in the same
state, to Donegal in Pennsylvania, and down the whole Appalachian chain
into Florida; and everywhere you will find settlements and towns bearing
the good old Irish names and founded by these patriots, who stood by
Washington and whose motto was, “No surrender to the British
Government.” (Applause.)
On that subject alone I hope to be permitted, Mr. President, if I can
find the leisure, to present to this Society, with due historical
references, the truth of history as regards that period.
During the famine period that I spoke of there was a Cunard ship called
the “Cephelonia.” The “Cephelonia” was one of the most celebrated ships
of the Cunard line, and, during the famine period, she brought great
numbers of Irish immigrants to Boston. One day not many years ago I was
talking to a couple of Irish American friends of mine in Boston, when a
third man came up and gave the time of day to my friend and passed on.
One of my friends turned to the other and said, “Is he a ‘Mayflower’?”
and my friend replied, “No, he,” said he, “is a ‘Cephelonian.’ The
‘Cephelonians’ now outnumber the ‘Mayflowers.’”
Now, my friends, I am really trespassing on your good nature because I
am keeping you from a great treat. I came here tonight and found my
countryman, McManus of Donegal, and then I found I had the honor of
sitting next to a good man from County Tyrone (and next to Donegal
Tyrone is a good substitute), the Rev. Dr. Sheppard.