This was a well-written and thorough investigation into a critical aspect of Irish-American history that is too often ignored out of convenience. I have to offer some criticism, though.
Liam, there is just one more myth — one more — that instead of discrediting I feel you’ve helped perpetuate (and please correct me if I’m issuing a false charge). It is the narrative that the “Scotch-Irish” were all descendants of Borderers who were transplanted to the Ulster Plantation. Many were, but many were also native Irish converts.
Most Irish Americans are Protestant, not Catholic. This is obviously in contrast to Ireland itself, and is probably due to either a mass exodus of Irish Protestants in the 18th Century or conversions to Protestantism in the British colonies — the latter would’ve likely been due to the lack of a Catholic structure in 18th Century Protestant America. It’s also been known for at least 3 decades that the Protestant majority of Irish Americans do not identify as Scotch-Irish.
I know from the genetic genealogy projects that my Irish ancestors are listed here; they were slave owners and Confederate sympathizers (many served in the Confederate army and cavalry) which has always been a dark stain on our family history. They are often grouped in with the Scotch-Irish in the genealogy literature, but they were neither Plantation Scots nor Presbyterians (they were Anglicans, later restyled as Episcopalians once ‘we’ declared independence from Britain and broke from the Church of England). I think that the “Scotch-Irish” designation was developed during the era of nativism to protect all Irish Protestants, regardless of ancestry, from the famine refugees (Irish Protestants were known as having been nativists, too).
My ancestry on both sides confuses many stereotypes. On my father’s side, my ancestry is Protestant Irish (Episcopalian) and Palatine German (Lutheran). My Irish ancestors were here in 1718, and my Palatine ones were here in 1709 as part of a scheme by the British Crown to move Palatines to the frontier of the New York colony to serve as a barrier against the French and Indians. My mother’s side is entirely Waldensian, a Northern Italian ethno-religious group that’s known as having been the oldest Protestant sect in the world, and perhaps the only Protestants in all of Italy. They didn’t arrive here until the late 19th Century when they had established a colony in the Piedmont of the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, ironically in proximity to where the Scotch-Irish had been settled since the early 1700s. I have a large family on both sides, and we’re currently spread all over the states. After the Civil War, a lot of my Irish ancestors moved to the North. Since they were all large estate owners and not hill people, they had no trouble relocating. On my mother’s side, the Waldensians turned their colony into a hub for manufacturing, and my mother’s ancestors moved to the Northeast as well. Thanks to the genealogy projects, I’ve located ancestors from London to Hawaii.
In any event, I have a personal interest in an accurate telling of Irish-American history, especially a telling of the stories of people who have similar backgrounds to my own. If you would like to contact me to hear the personal details of my ancestry so that you may use it as an example or a basis for further research, I would be delighted to discuss it with you. I can show you what I’ve found in the last five years of researching Protestant Irish settlers, from the surnames listed in the Scotch-Irish genealogy, the church records, and the genetic evidence. Right now a certain Barry McCain is currently running the largest Scotch-Irish DNA project in the country, and the existence of ‘real’ Irish families among the Scotch-Irish settlers has been confirmed in surname analysis and, more conclusively, by genetic science. For now I can show you a quick glance at the records of just one county, Augusta County, VA, which will illustrate what I am talking about:
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009029527
Click on the first Harvard University version.
Those are court records, militia records, and marriage records for Augusta County for the period 1745–1800; most records are dated to before the Revolutionary War. Scroll to the index in the back and survey the surnames contained in these records. Here is a sample:
Callahan, Conley, Coulter, Donahue, Donnelly, Donovan, Eagan, Fagan, Farrell, Finney, Finn, FitzGerald, FitzPatrick, FitzJarrell, Fleming, Hogan, Hughes, Keenan, Kelly, Kilkenny, Looney, Lynch, McBride, McCartney, McCarty, McCormick, McCurry, McDavitt, McEvoy, McKee, McMahon, Maloney, Mahoney, Murley, Murphy, Nealey, O’Brien, O’Dare, O’Dear, O’Donald, O’Dowland, O’Dougherty, O’Friel, O’Hara, O’Hona, O’Neal, Quinn, Ragan, Reily, Riley, Ryan, Ryley, Sweeney, Swearly….and I can’t type anymore names..last one — Sullivan.
I’ve done this type of review for just about every Scotch-Irish settlement. I’ve also checked the available church records and found that they, like my ancestors, were all members of Protestant churches.
I sincerely believe that this type of research will be most effective in your quest to slay lies like the Irish slave myth. The reason why so many people have accepted such an absurd pseudo-history is because the entire discussion of Irish-American history is centered on Catholicism and the Irish discrimination that occurred during the famine period. But this is not the whole story. It isn’t even close to the whole story. What’s needed here is a merited recognition of the history of Irish Protestants so that we can offer the public much-needed balance to a discussion that’s currently one-sided and dominated by debates about NINA signs (the latest being a debate between the scholar Richard Jensen and a teenage girl) and victimhood and provide them with a fuller, more accurate understanding of Irish-American history. It is clear that a narrow telling of Irish-American history is being used as a political device by activists on the left and right, when the real history isn’t much different than that of other white American ethnic groups, like the French and Germans.