"Scotch-Irish,"
"Real Irish," and "Black Irish":
Immigrants
and Identities in the Old South
Kerby
A. Miller
University
of Missouri-Columbia
30
August 1997
In their letters home, mid- and late 19th-century Irish immigrants in New England, upstate New York, and the Upper Midwest frequently complained of the bitter weather they endured from November through March. However, the American census of 1860 suggested that few Irishmen and -women had settled in the Southern states, with their more congenial winter climates. On the eve of the Civil War, there were 1.6 million Irish-born inhabitants of the United States, representing 6% of the entire white population. Of these Irish immigrants, merely 11% (fewer than 200,000) resided in all the Southern slave states combined, and the Irish comprised only 2.25% of the total Southern white population. Moreover, nearly 70% of these Irish-born Southerners were concentrated in Louisiana and in four "border states"--Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri--primarily in cities such as New Orleans, Wilmington, Baltimore, Louisville, and St. Louis. In the long-settled states of the Southeast, Irish immigrants were few. For example, in 1860 Georgia’s population included about 6,600 Irish immigrants and South Carolina’s less than 5,000--merely 1.1% and 1.7% of their respective inhabitants. Of course, these figures represent primarily the overwhelmingly Catholic influx of Irish immigrants who had entered the South since the Great Famine and the wholesale evictions of the late 1 840s and early 1850s.
However, we know that there was a substantial Irish presence in the South during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. David Doyle has examined the returns for the first American census of 1790 and has concluded that roughly one-fifth of the white population of the Southern states, over a quarter-million Southerners, were of Irish birth or descent. The proportions ranged from 17%-18% in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina to as
high as one-third in Kentucky and Tennessee, while in Georgia and South Carolina, the Irish comprised slightly over one-fourth of their respective populations. David estimated that roughly two-thirds of these early Irish-American Southerners were what later generations would usually call the "Scotch-Irish"--of Ulster ancestry and Presbyterian religion. However, David also argued that this group included many whose families had been Anglicans or Catholics in northern Ireland but who had converted to Protestantism in the Colonies and been absorbed into what he called an "Ulster-American" community. Furthermore, David contended that the other one-third of the Southern "Irish" in 1790 represented families whose members or ancestors had been born in the south of Ireland; originally, many had been Catholics, but, given the dearth of priests and chapels in the Colonies, by 1790 most of these had also joined American Protestant congregations, thus also merging into the so-called "Scotch-Irish" group.
By 1860, of course, the overwhelming majority of the Irish-born settlers in the eighteenth-and even the very early nineteenth-century South had died. And, since the 1860 Census did not record parental birthplaces, the ancestral origins of their living descendants also went untallied. However, exactly two hundred years after the first American Census, that of 1990 recorded some rather curious statistics. In 1990 some 38.7 million Americans responded to a question concerning their ethnicity by listing "Irish" as their response. One remarkable result was that 34% of these self-described "Irish-Americans" (about 13.3 million of them) resided in the South--although in 1860 a mere 11% of Irish immigrants had lived in the Southern states. Put another way, in 1990 one-fifth of white Southerners identified their ancestry as Irish, although in 1860 only 2% of white Southerners had been Irish-born.
What is even more surprising is that, although the respondents to the 1990 Census questionnaire were given the option of designating "Scotch-Irish" as their ancestry, relatively few Southern whites did so. Only 2.6 million whites in the South--less than 4% of all Southern whites--stated their ethnicity as "Scotch-Irish," compared with the 20% of white Southerners who simply claimed to be "Irish." For example, in 1990 21% of Georgia’s whites claimed "Irish"
ancestry, whereas only 4% labelled themselves "Scotch-Irish," and in South Carolina the respective figures were 20% "Irish" compared with fewer than 7% "Scotch-Irish."
Curiously, if one combines the self-described "Irish" and "Scotch-Irish" in the Southern states in 1990, they comprise about 24% of the entire Southern white population--which is almost precisely the all-"Irish" proportion of the South’s population in 1790, according to David Doyle’s calculations, plus an allowance for the small Catholic Irish immigration of the mid-nineteenth century! One might conclude that in 1790 a surprisingly large number of the remote descendants of the South’s early Irish Protestant settlers--of those who had emigrated prior to the American Revolution or, at the latest, prior to 1830--were willing to identify themselves with the birthplace of ancestors who had left Ireland two hundred or even two hundred and fifty years earlier--and even to the extent of designating their ethnicity as "Irish," rather than "Scotch-Irish," although the overwhelming majority of their forebears had been Ulster Presbyterians.
Ultimately, of course, the question of ethnicity is not one of ancestral birthplace or religion but one of individual and collective identification, which in turn is subjective and variable, shaped by a multitude of shifting social, cultural, political, and psychological circumstances. To provide an extreme example, at least through the 1960s, St. Patrick’s Day in New York City was celebrated by an association named the Loyal Yiddish Sons of Erin, whose members were the Irish-born offspring of Polish and Lithuanian Jews for most of whom Ireland was merely a brief interlude in a multi-staged migration from Eastern Europe to America. This suggests that, within certain limits, ethnicity can be a matter of individual choice--as well as an extremely complex, situational, multi-layered phenomenon. This may be especially true in the United States, at least for whites, and indeed one of the assumed benefits of migration from Europe to America was that it allowed the newcomers to create identities that might differ significantly from the categories imposed by public officials, landlords, clergy, or even kinsmen in their former homelands.
Usually, however, there are "certain limits" within which immigrants, their descendants, and even "impartial observers" can define ethnicity. And these constraints are often more-or-less political: overtly so in a country like Nazi Germany, covertly even in the United States. For example, in 1985 perhaps the worst review my book, Emigrants and Exiles, received was written from South Carolina by a historian who clearly was outraged that I had written a history of both Irish Protestant and Irish Catholic immigrants, and thereby, in his opinion, blended and confused the stories of two groups which he regarded as almost racially as well as culturally and historically distinct.
Although the "two nations" view may prevail in contemporary Ireland, this was a view more commonly held in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than today. From the 1830s on, celebrants of what Michael O’Brien called the "Scotch-Irish Myth" drew sharp and often invidious comparisons between their Irish Protestant ancestors and the Irish Catholic immigrants of the Famine and post-Famine decades. Ignoring Ulster Presbyterian immigrants whose economic distress or political activities did not exemplify group prosperity and patriotism, they projected the frailties of their own unfortunates and misfits onto Irish Catholic immigrants, implying that the Scotch-Irish could not have been failures because, by definition, the virtues inherent in their religion and British origins guaranteed their moral, cultural, and, hence, their economic and political superiority.
Certainly, as James Leyburn has written, "Scotch-Irish" is "a useful term... express[ing] a historical reality," and, if employed carefully and neutrally, can reflect valid distinctions between Ulster Presbyterian immigrants of seventeenth-century Scottish origins and Irish Anglicans, Quakers, Methodists, and Baptists of English, Scottish, Welsh, Huguenot, and Palatine descent, as well as Irish Catholics (and Protestants) of Gaelic, Hiberno-Norman, or Scottish Highland backgrounds. However, use of the term, "Scotch-Irish," in eighteenth-century America, either by contemporaries or by Ulster Presbyterians themselves, was apparently quite rare (Leyburn found only a handful of documented instances). The label was reborn in the early nineteenth century, in
the evangelical fervour of the Second Great Awakening, among middle-class Americans of Ulster Presbyterian descent who were appalled by the possibility that they or their ancestors might be identified with the increasing numbers of poor Catholic immigrants. By the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, the term had developed to include all Americans of Irish descent who were not currently Catholic, as the authors of county histories in states as far afield as South Carolina and South Dakota busily designated as "Scotch-Irish" the ancestors of respectable Methodist and Baptist farmers and businessmen named O’Brien, O’Sullivan, and O’Callaghan!
In the eighteenth- and very early nineteenth centuries, however, designations such as "Irish Protestants," "north Irish," or, most frequently and most vaguely inclusive of all, simply "Irish," were much more common than "Scotch-Irish." But what did it mean to be "Irish" in Ireland and in the Old South during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? In some respects, ethnic identification among the Irish-born had both more and less significance than it does today. It had more significance because, prior to the American Revolution and the repeal of the Irish Penal Laws, a person’s religious affiliation determined the extent of his civil rights and economic opportunities, to the benefit of Protestants (especially Anglicans) and to the detriment of Catholics. Yet, it also had less significance because, on the personal level, the boundaries of these ethnoreligious communities were much more permeable than they later became, and a remarkable degree of ethnic and religious fluidity prevailed in eighteenth-century Ireland and among early Irish immigrants in America. For example, the earliest Irish-American organisations--the St. Patrick’s and Hibernian associations--included merchants and professionals of all denominations, reflecting a tolerance that stemmed from shared business interests as well as Enlightenment rationalism. Among poorer migrants, the relative frequency of intermarriage and conversion reflected a pragmatic understanding that ethnic and religious affiliations were not absolute but contingent on local economic and social circumstances. Early Irish immigrants appear to have been relatively nonchalant about what subsequent generations would regard as religious apostasy or ethnic treason. The result, as noted earlier, was the absorption of nearly all early Irish Catholic (and also Irish Anglican) immigrants into the Presbyterian faith of the great majority.
Furthermore, in the late eighteenth century, new, secular, and inclusive definitions of "Irishness" temporarily promised to subsume Ireland’s different religious and ethnic strains. Unfortunately, of course, the era of Grattan and Tone was cut short, and both the old popular and the new political traditions of tolerance faded--rapidly in Ireland, more slowly in the United States. Ireland’s future would belong to those who practised the politics of ethno-religious polarisation, but among the immigrants in America the ecumenical ideals of the United Irishmen flourished through the Jeffersonian and into the Jacksonian era, as most Irish Protestant and Catholic immigrants subsumed their religious differences under the banner of a common republicanism.
To be sure, as early as the 1820s, some Irish Protestant newcomers were conspicuous in their leadership of American nativist movements, temperance associations, and street mobs that demonised and assaulted Irish Catholic immigrants. And by the 1850s, nearly all Irish-American Protestants and Catholics in the northern United States were mobilised in opposing political parties. However, the old traditions of tolerance and sociability, and the new tradition of ecumenical nationalism, seem to have lingered longer in the Old South than elsewhere in the United States. For example, during the first four decades of the nineteenth century, the most flourishing Hibernian and Irish-American nationalist societies were situated not in Boston or New York but in Southern cities, such as Charleston and Savannah, where they were usually led by Protestants of Ulster birth or descent. In part, this apparent anachronism may reflect the weakness of the Catholic Church in the Old South--its inability either to mobilise its own flock or to frighten Irish-American Protestants away from secular alliances with their Catholic countrymen. It may also reflect the general tendency of all Southern whites to downplay internal differences for the sake of solidarity against the region’s large and potentially-rebellious Black population--for slaves outnumbered whites by a ratio of 3:2 in South Carolina, by 9:1 in the coastal districts around Charleston and Savannah.
Be assured that I am not claiming that Irish Protestant and Catholic immigrants or their
descendants comprised one happy, homogenous group in the Old South, much less in the rest of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. However, I am arguing that during this period "Irish" ethnic identity was much more varied, flexible, and inclusive than it would later become, and that the social and political issues that engaged the attention of Irish immigrants, and that caused them to define themselves, often transcended the religious divisions that later became so prominent.
With that in mind, I propose in the next section of this paper to briefly sketch some aspects of the history of early Irish immigration to the Old South, relying primarily on the immigrants’ letters and memoirs, before returning at the end to some biographical illustrations of the complexity and mutability of Irish ethnic identities.
Of the one-quarter to one-third of a million Irish who emigrated to North America between 1700 and the American Revolution--most of them Ulster Presbyterians--I would estimate that roughly half eventually settled in the Southern colonies. I say "eventually" because, while a minority arrived directly from Ireland, aboard ships that disembarked at Southern ports, the majority first landed at Philadelphia and then moved west and then south, often over several generations, down the Great Wagon Road into the backcountries of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia--where they mingled with the smaller streams of immigrants coming up the rivers from Charleston and Savannah. Although these early pioneers have captured most scholarly and popular attention--and although at least a few later immigrants (such as Thomas Addis Emmet) refused on principle to settle where they would be dependent on slave labour--during the fifty years or so after the American Revolution perhaps as many as 100,000 Irish--again, primarily Ulster Presbyterians--migrated to the Southern states. Increasingly, they disembarked at New Orleans or Mobile, rather than at Charleston or Savannah, and settled in new South-western states such as Alabama, while others landed in Philadelphia and Baltimore and moved westward into Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri.
Their motives for leaving Ireland were a subject of controversy in the eighteenth-century.
Ulster Presbyterians, especially the clergy, usually claimed that emigration was motivated primarily by religious and political persecution. Thus, Robert Witherspoon, who migrated from Belfast to Charleston in 1734, later recorded that his family’s exodus was determined by his grandfather’s resolution "to seek relief from civil and ecclesiastical oppression" in Ireland. In the nineteenth century, "Scotch-Irish" eulogists expanded upon this theme, likening the early immigrants to the Pilgrims of Plymouth, in order to claim "founding father" status for their ancestors. However, although religious zeal coloured and justified their departures, the primary motives for early, as well as for later, Irish emigration were economic. High rents, tithes and other taxes, low wages and periodic depressions in the linen trade, poor harvests and outbreaks of livestock disease: such conditions, operating in a context of small farms and large families, contrasted unfavourably with a vision of unlimited acres, cheap homesteads, high wages, and seemingly boundless opportunities in the New World. As James Lindsey of Desertmartin, Co. Derry, wrote to his cousins in Pennsylvania at mid-century, "The good bargains of the lands in your country do greatly encourage me to pluck up my spirits and make ready for the journey, for we are now oppressed with our lands set at eight shillings per acre and other improvements, cutting our land in two-acre parts and [hedging] and only two years’ time for doing it all--Yea, we cannot stand more!"
After the American Revolution, the failure of the 1798 rebellion, and the election of the Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, as president in 1800, the new United States became doubly attractive as both an economic and political asylum. This may have been particularly true of the Old South where, as Ulsterman John Joyce reported from Republican Virginia, "[t]hey are very fond of Irish Emigration here,. . . it is Given as a Toast often at their Fairs," and the people "much applaud the Irish for their Resolution, and Spirit of Independence." Thus, writing shortly after the Revolution, Andrew Gibson, a farmer in Lisnagirr, Co. Tyrone, told his brother in North Carolina, "I think you are blessed living in a Land of Liberty and free from the great oppression of landlords and everyone in authority which indeed poor Ireland labours under at present.... The gentlemen are laying on so great taxes.., that it is hard to live here. I pay upwards of £1.10 per
year and I have come to great losses these three bad seasons by overflowing of floods and some loss of cattle.... My wife and I are too old to undertake the danger," Gibson concluded, but "our young folk would fondly go to America."
Letters such as those received by Andrew Gibson undoubtedly provided the primary encouragement for emigration to the Old South. However, there were other inducements as well. On several occasions prior to the Revolution, the South Carolina and Georgia governments offered land grants, tools, provisions, and religious freedom to Irish Protestants willing to settle in the Southern backcountry--to create a buffer against Indian attacks and to reduce the danger of slave revolts by increasing the white population. Private land speculators also encouraged Irish immigration. For example, in 1765 John Rea, an Ulster-born Indian trader, advertised in the Belfast News-Letter for "industrious" immigrants from the north of Ireland to settle at Queensborough Township, on his 50,000 land grant in the Georgia backcountry, promising the newcomers one hundred acres per family, plus horses, mules, and other supplies. "The land I have chosen," he declared, "is good for wheat, and any kind of grain, indigo, flax, and hemp will grow to great perfection, and I do not know any place better situated for a flourishing township than this place will be.. People that live on the low land near the sea are subject to fever and agues, but high up in the country it is healthy [with] fine springs of good water. The winter is the finest in the world, never too cold, very little frost and no snow." Rea candidly admitted that he would not "advise any person to come here that lives well in Ireland, because there is not the pleasure of society [here] that there is there, [nor] the comfort of the Gospel preached, no fairs or markets to go to. But we have greater plenty of good eating and drinking, for, and I bless God for it, I keep as plentiful a table as most gentlemen in Ireland, with good punch, wine, and beer." Rea concluded with the clinching enticement that, "If any person that comes here can bring money to purchase a slave or two, they may live very easy and well."
Of course, emigration to the Old South was not without hazards, as both Gibson and Rea implied. Before the Revolution, voyages from Belfast to Charleston and Savannah normally took
from eight to ten weeks. By the 1830s the average voyage was merely six to eight weeks, but fear of Atlantic storms and shipboard epidemics still made many Irishmen and -women quail at the prospect. Also, during the Anglo-French wars of 1791-1815, Irish emigrants had to brave the danger of attacks by French naval vessels and privateers--and of seizures by British ships and impressment into the British navy. In 1806-1807, for example, John O’Raw, a young emigrant from north Antrim experienced an unusually miserable voyage to Charleston that combined all these hazards. After his vessel nearly shipwrecked on the coasts of Donegal, he wrote, "We encountered the most dangerous storms and head winds for three weeks and was driven into the Bay of Biscay off the coast of France. A great many of our passengers now took the Bloody Flux and one child died of it. The weather continued most dreadful for six weeks, during which we were frequently carrying away our yards and rigging in dangerous storms of thunder and lightening. The captain said he never was at sea in such [a storm] before. I was for four weeks.. almost reduced to the point of death by sickness." After nearly two months being blown back and forth across the Atlantic, O’Raw’s ship was wrecked on the coast of Bermuda. The immigrants were saved, but nearly all their possessions were lost, and most of his friends were forcibly conscripted into the British navy when they went to the island’s capital--a fate which 0’ Raw escaped by hiding in the remote parts of Bermuda until he and his remaining companions were able to chart another, smaller vessel to convey them to Charleston. After more violent storms which nearly sank his second ship, O’Raw finally reached South Carolina, over five months after he had left Belfast!
Even after disembarking in Southern ports, early Irish immigrants had to endure unaccustomed hardships. Usually landing in summer, they found the climate oppressively hot, and they were assailed by diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, which had been virtually unknown in Ireland. Historians estimate that the great majority of the Irish indentured servants transported to the Southern colonies and the West Indies during the seventeenth century died within a few years of arrival. Conditions were improved by the late eighteenth- and early
Nineteenth centuries, but Southern ports such as New Orleans and Mobile had well-deserved reputations as Irish immigrant graveyards, and even later migrants to Charleston and Savannah had to survive a "seasoning" process of six months or more before they were fit to work. For example, although John O’Raw took care, soon after his arrival, to leave Charleston and the lowlands for the healthier South Carolina upcountry, he took ill for four months at Newbury and nearly died of "fever" before he could resume his occupation of schoolmaster.
Even healthy immigrants were often discouraged, at least initially, by what John Rea had described as the primitive state of Southern society, especially in the eighteenth century. To be sure, in 1768 Hester Wylly from Coleraine found her new home in Savannah quite congenial. "My dear Helen," she wrote to her sister, "I am sure it will give you pleasure to hear that this place agrees with me as well as Ireland. I have not found any difference. It’s true in the heat of summer the people that is exposed to the sun is subject to what they call fever and ague, but it soon leaves them and is seldom dangerous. . . . As for the people here, they are extremely polite and sociable. We form a wrong notion of the women, for I assure you I never saw finer women in any part of the world, nor finer complexions in my life. They are very gay and sprightly, [and] we have constant assemblies and many other amusements to make the place agreeable."
Of course, as the wife of a wealthy planter and slave-owner, and as sister of the Speaker of the Georgia Assembly, Mrs. Wylly rarely mixed with the great majority of "the people that is exposed to the sun." More typical was the response of Robert Witherspoon, who penned quite a different account of his family’s first years (in the 1730s and 1740s) on the banks of the Black River, in backcountry South Carolina. After travelling upriver from Charleston, he wrote, "my mother and we children were still in expectations of coming to an agreeable place, but when we arrived and saw nothing but a wilderness, and instead of a comfortable house, no other than one of dirt, our spirits sank.... We had a great deal of trouble and hardships in our first settling.... We were also much oppressed with fear.. , especially of being massacred by the Indians, or torn by wild beasts, or of being lost and perishing in the woods, of whom there were three persons [in our
party] who were never found. ... [M]any were taken sick with ague and fever, some died and some became dropsical and also died."
The initial hardships were the worst, and those who survived, and acquired legal title to farms and sufficient capital to purchase slaves, often prospered. Thanks to slave labour and a flourishing market for indigo, when Witherspoon’s father died in 1768 (the same year Hester Wylly arrived in Savannah), Robert inherited an estate worth $25,000, including a substantial planter’s house built on the "English" or "Virginia" model. The steady expansion of market agriculture into the Southern backcountry transformed many of the Irish who had settled there from subsistence farmers and cattle-drivers into planters and slave-owners, especially after 1791, when the invention of the cotton gin enabled the spread westward of short-staple cotton production. By the early nineteenth century, the Carolina and Georgia backcountries had spawned their own aristocracies of Irish-stock planters, such as the family of John C. Calhoun, and by this time, also, Irish newcomers such as John O’Raw could count on assistance from a dense network of well-established kinsmen and friends who had preceded them. However, the conditions that Robert Witherspoon had described in the 1730s--and the semi-barbarous society that the probably-Irish Anglican missionary, Charles Woodmason, lamented in the Carolina backcountry in the early 1770s--were replicated time and again on the retreating margins of the Southern frontier.
Moreover, the great majority of early Irish settlers in the Old South did not become successful planters, even in the backcountry regions where land was relatively cheap. In the 1780s, for example, over half the adult males were landless in the "Scotch-Irish" strongholds of Augusta and Rockbridge counties, in Virginia’s upper Shenandoah Valley, and during the next fifty years such men migrated further west or south, on a trek which often found an economic dead-end in the Appalachian foothills, the Piney Woods of Mississippi, or the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas. Even before the Civil War, depressed cotton prices, and the boll weevil ravaged the Southern economy, Northern visitors such as Frederick Law Olmsted were appalled by the slovenly and culturally- as well as economically impoverished conditions prevailing among
the Old South’s "yeoman" farmers. And, belying their eulogists’ claims of inherent superiority, by 1900 the "Scotch-Irish" of the Southern states were generally poorer and less-educated than the Catholic Irish who had settled in the urban-industrial North during the previous century.
To conclude, I would like to return to my initial argument concerning the variety and mutability of early Irish identities by examining the careers of four individuals who came from Ireland to South Carolina and Georgia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first and perhaps the most fascinating story is that of Samuel Burke. For several technical reasons, Burke was not precisely an Irish immigrant, but culturally and linguistically he was more "Irish" than most of those who emigrated from Ireland to America in the eighteenth century. Burke was actually born in Charleston about 1755, but he was taken back to Cork as a mere infant, christened and raised there. In 1774, when he was about twenty years old, Burke left Ireland and returned to America, as personal servant to an Anglo-Irish official, Montford Browne, the newly-appointed royal governor of West Florida. When the American Revolution broke out, both Browne and Burke were seized by the rebellious colonists and sent to prison in Hartford, Connecticut. After their release, through a prisoner exchange, they went to the British military base in New York City, where Burke married a widow with a modest fortune and employed his fluency in the Irish language to assist Browne and other officers in persuading Irish Catholic dockworkers to join a Loyalist regiment. Burke himself enlisted in the regiment he helped recruit and, accompanied by his wife, served under the now-Brigadier General Browne in the Southern campaign of the Revolutionary War, during which he was wounded on several occasions. Burke hoped to settle in his native South Carolina, on property that the British confiscated from American rebels, but the British defeat dashed his hopes, and in 1782 he and his wife evacuated Charleston with the British Navy. By 1785 Burke was living in London and employed in an artificial flower garden for is. per day, although he was scarcely able to work because of his war wounds. In great distress, he applied to the British government for compensation for his military service and lost possessions.
Outside the Middle Colonies, a large minority of Irish immigrants were Loyalists during the American Revolution, and in the Carolinas and Georgia the conflict degenerated into a vicious, bloody civil war between rival Ulster-American factions, some motivated by political ideals, others by greed and revenge--eager to ride to wealth and power at their neighbours’ expense. For example, most of John Rea’ s Ulster settlers in Queensborough Township, Georgia, remained faithful to their king, and in reprisal the victorious patriots confiscated their lands and obliterated the very name of their settlement. Likewise, the rebels seized the great plantations owned by Hester Wylly’s kinsmen, who fled to the West Indies, although eventually they recovered part of their former possessions. Thus, it is not Samuel Burke’s political allegiance that is surprising. Rather, given the fact that Burke was "Irish" in nearly every meaningful respect, what is mind-boggling--and what clearly perplexed the British commissioners in London who, rather grudgingly, granted him a small pension--was that Samuel Burke was what the commissioners described as "a Black" in their official documents!
The second biographical sketch is one I have already begun--that of John O’Raw, the young immigrant from north Antrim who endured the long, miserable voyage to Charleston in
1806-1807. Unlike most contemporary emigrants from Ulster, O’Raw was Catholic, not Presbyterian, from a townland near Ballymena. In 1798, although merely fifteen years old and despite the admonitions of his priest, O’Raw joined his Presbyterian neighbours and went out to fight with the United Irishmen. Apparently, Presbyterian-Catholic relations in late eighteenth-century north Antrim were much better than they are today: then both felt oppressed by an Anglican artisocracy, and the Catholic O’Raws and O’Haras socialised and intermarried with Presbyterian Moores, McCauleys, and Boyds, whose kinsmen gladly assisted John O’Raw when he came to South Carolina.
After a short tenure as a schoolmaster in the Carolina backcountry, O’Raw decided to try his fortunes in Charleston. By 1820 he had progressed from a clerkship to the ownership of two slaves and of a moderately prosperous grocery on Meeting Street. He was also a member of St.
Mary’s Catholic church and also of the city’s Hibernian Society. However, although O’Raw became an American citizen and served in the Anglo-American War of 1812-15, in the late 1820s he returned to Co. Antrim and died there in 1841. Perhaps that suggests how O’Raw weighed the two sides of his "Irish-American" identity, but even more intriguing is what O’Raw and other Irish Catholics did during the so-called "Charleston schism" of 1815-1819. During those years, Archbishop Neale of Baltimore tried to impose an ultra-royalist French priest, a refugee from the French Revolution, on the Catholics of St. Mary’s. Despite the archbishop’s charge that they were "disloyal" to the Church, and despite his threat to excommunicate them if they did not submit to his authority, O’Raw and St. Mary’s other Irish parishioners (most of them, like O’Raw, formerly associated with the United Irishmen) refused to accept the French cleric--not because of his nativity, but because he was a bitter enemy of the republican principles for which in 1798 they and their Protestant countrymen had fought in Ireland. It is fair to say that, one hundred years later, very few Irish-American Catholics (particularly men as "respectable" as O’Raw and his friends) would have dared defy their bishop so openly and vigorously, for by then Irish Catholics on both sides of the ocean regarded religious loyalty as paramount and essential to their sense of ethnic identity. However, as I noted earlier, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Irish Catholics (and Protestants) often defined "Irishness" in political rather than religious terms, in ways that united rather than divided them.
O’Raw tried to adapt his religion to his political principles, but my third story is of a Catholic immigrant whose ambitions and circumstances in the Old South persuaded him to abandon his faith and embrace the Protestantism of his neighbours. Andrew Leary O’Brien was born in Co. Cork in 1815, the son of a strong farmer who intended him to become a priest and thereby enhance the family’s spiritual and social status. In 1837, after years of expensive schooling in Ireland, O’Brien’s parents sent him to finished his clerical studies at Chambly Seminary in Quebec. O’Brien’s erotic shipboard dreams, recorded in his memoir, of beautiful and seductive blonde-haired women, probably suggested his unsuitability for a celibate life, and so
perhaps he was fortunate when the Canadian Rebellion of 1837 shut down the seminary and cast him adrift. O’Brien made his way south to Pennsylvania, where he found work as a stonemason in the building of the Susquehanna Canal. There, surrounded by hundreds of uncouth, illiterate, frequently drunken, and often violent Irish Catholic canal diggers, O’Brien discovered for the first time that, in his words, "I felt mean at the thought that I was an Irishman." Despite his father’s entreaties that he return to Ireland and resume his studies, O’Brien concluded to escape his former associates and, one suspects, his entire past. He took his earnings and sailed from New York to Charleston. For several years, he taught school in Bamwell District, South Carolina, where he married into a Methodist family whose church he joined after attending a camp meeting. In 1848 he moved to Cuthbert, Georgia, where in 1854 he founded what was then called Randolph--now Andrew--College. Today, very few of its faculty or graduates are aware that their College, still piously Methodist, was established by an Irish Catholic seminary student and canal worker who had concluded that acceptance and respectability in an overwhelmingly-Protestant Southern society were more important than the retention of his ethnic and religious heritage.
My last biography is that of William Hill, a merchant and farmer, who lived in Abbeville District, South Carolina, from 1822 until his death, aged eighty, in 1886. Hill was born in 1805 in Ballynure parish, Co. Antrim, into a Presbyterian family that had been implicated in the 1798 Rebellion. According to family tradition, Hill disliked his stepmother and so, at age seventeen, emigrated to Charleston, bearing letters of introduction to a Major John Donald, an earlier emigrant from Ballynure, who had settled in Abbeville and fought in the War of 1812. At first, Hill clerked in Major Donald’s store, but within two years he married his employer’s daughter, Anna, and commenced farming land, which his father-in-law gave him as a wedding present. By the late 1 820s he had given up active farming and had begun selling goods in his own country store, although he always retained ownership of about 360 acres, planted in wheat, oats, and Indian corn. Sometime in the 1 840s, he moved into Abbeville town, population 400, where he prospered as a merchant. Although Hill had no formal legal training, he gained a reputation as an honest, competent adviser in probate- law and estate administration, and in 1852 he was elected to the first of eight successive terms as Abeville District’s Judge of the Court of Ordinary. The 1860 Census listed Hill as possessing $20,000 worth of real and personal property, in addition to fifteen slaves.
As for many Southern whites, the Civil War was disastrous for William Hill and his family. He claimed to have lost over $30,000 in slaves, Confederate bonds and currency, and in the general depreciation of real estate, while the advent of Radical Reconstruction deprived him of his office of Probate Judge. Two of his sons-in-law died of wounds or disease while serving in the Confederate Army, and his own eldest son was severely wounded. Hill continued to dabble in trade until about 1871, when he retired to his farm outside Abbeville town, where he died fifteen years later.
Throughout his life, Hill wrote regularly to his brother, David, back in Ballynure, and, using his correspondence in conjunction with what is known about his career in South Carolina, we can try to reconstruct the changes in his sense of ethnic identity. One of Hill’s obituaries described him as "a most enthusiastic Irishman, never being entirely weaned of his love for his native land." Certainly, Hill’s emotional identification with Ireland comes through most strongly in his earliest surviving correspondence of the 1 840s. In one letter, for example, he chides his brother for not writing more often: "There is little or nothing here [in South Carolina] to concern you," he wrote, but "every nook and corner of the neighbourhood of Ballynure teems with absorbing interest to me. Although it is upwards of thirty-two years since I left ‘the green hills of my youth,’ I can still luxuriate in fancy, ... young again, strolling over the old green sod," and he longed to return to his native land, if only for a visit.
There are several probable reasons for William Hill’s profound homesickness for Ireland. One is the circumstance of his emigration: at a relatively young age, and impelled not so much by ambition as by a deteriorating relationship with his stepmother. Another is his romantic attachment to a woman he left behind in Ireland and to whom he referred in one of his early letters, when he remembered "whispering words of artless love to her who was--most beautiful, most lovely, but now alas, how changed." Hill asked his brother, "Do you surmise to whom I allude? --Well then, tell me of her. Although the vase is long broken, yet still the fragrance of the once sweet flower remains." By contrast, in not one of his six surviving letters written before 1867 did Hill ever refer to his wife in South Carolina. Thus, although Hill’s obituary referred to his "beloved wife" and their "happy union for nearly sixty years," I suspect that his primary affections long centred on someone back in Ireland.
Indeed, if Hill had not married so young and so soon after his immigration, one wonders whether he might have returned to Ireland permanently, as did John O’Raw. I say this because, although Hill’s obituaries shroud his first twenty years or so in South Carolina in relative obscurity, they appear to be characterised by a lack of both material success and personal commitment to his adopted country. For example, it may be significant that Hill did not apply for American citizenship until 1834, eight years after immigrating, and he took no part in public life until 1836, when he joined Abbeville’ s militia for service in the Seminole War. Interestingly, it was in this period, during and in the immediate aftermath of the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33--when state leaders first challenged the Federal Government’s authority--that white South Carolinians were under intense pressure to demonstrate communal loyalty and solidarity. Since Hill’s obituaries made no mention of any participation in the Nullification crusade, as they surely would have done had he been involved, I suspect that Hill was included in the one-third of Abbeville District’s voters (mostly poor men, as was Hill at that time) who opposed Nullification--and so he may have hastened thereafter to conform to communal standards. Certainly, it was during the twenty years following the Nullification crisis that Hill rose in prosperity and public esteem: by acquiring the military credentials, the membership in Abbeville’s Presbyterian church, and the ownership of slaves which marked his entrance into the second tier of the District’s elite and that made him electable to public office. By 22 November 1860, Hill’s eminence was signalled by his membership, alongside the kinsmen of the late John C. Calhoun and other wealthy planters, of the local committee that organised Abbeville’ s public meeting that selected delegates to South
Carolina’s fateful Secession Convention.
During the same decades that Hill was becoming more "American" (which, in Abbeville, meant more "Southern"), several specific developments, both in Ireland and in South Carolina, operated to lessen or qualify Hill’s identification with his homeland. During the Nullification Crisis, South Carolina’s only Irish-American newspaper, the Charleston Irishman and Southern Democrat, was "violently anti-nullification," and the consequent association of "Irishness" and "disloyalty" to South Carolina in the minds of many local whites may have shaken Hill’s attachment to Ireland. More certainly, in the early 1840s Daniel O’Connell joined with Dublin Quakers, Ulster Presbyterian ministers, and Yankee abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison in denouncing Southern slavery, urging all "true Irishmen" in America to work for immediate emancipation. In response, Hibernian societies throughout the South either shut their doors or repudiated O’Connell’s leadership. Indeed, one of William Hill’s own letter to brother David, vehemently denying that "slavery and Christianity were inconsistent," indicates the growing gap between the anti-slavery sentiments that prevailed in Ireland and his own commitments--not just to his propertied interests, but to the safety of the white minority in a District where, between 1820 and 1850, the proportion of slaves in the local population had risen from 40% to 60%.
Another crucial development in the late 1840s and 1850s was the immigration to South Carolina of several thousand Irish Catholic peasants, impoverished refugees from the Great Famine. William Hill’s "Irish" identity was ecumenical in theory, shaped by the United Irishmen’s republican ideals which forbade invidious distinctions between Irish Protestants and Catholics. Hill was true to that legacy: he named one of his sons Robert Emmet Hill; and in his letters he denounced England’s "oppressive" rule over Ireland, expressed his detestation of Irish Orangemen for their loyalism and anti-Catholic activities, refused to consider allowing his son to attend the "Queen’s College" in Belfast, because of its royalist associations, and gleefully predicted that the British would lose the Crimean War.
However, Hill’s sense of "Irishness" had been shaped by his local, native environment,
and that environment had been almost exclusively Protestant, as well as relatively genteel. In Ballynure parish, 85% of the inhabitants had been Presbyterians, only 5% Catholics. As a result, Hill was shocked and embarrassed by what he described as the "poverty and want, rags, squalor, and wretchedness" of the Famine Irish who came to South Carolina at mid-century and who, in his words, "reflect discredit on the better class of their countrymen." Although admitting that "most of the [new Irish] emigrants.., never had opportunity of polish," for the first time he was obliged to distinguish between his own people and what he called "the real Irish, of papist stock." Hill’s fear of guilt by association was not imaginary, for in the mid-1850s a Native-American (or Know Nothing) Party, pledged to halt the Irish influx and curtail immigrants’ political rights, briefly flourished in South Carolina. Indeed, in 1858 Hill himself was nearly defeated for re-election as Probate Judge by a Know-Nothing candidate who denounced him for his "Irish" background.
On one hand, white South Carolina’s defeat and devastation in the Civil War, plus the partial wreck of his own fortune, rekindled Hill’s nostalgia for Ireland and made him yearn to "go back even in my old age to the dear land wherein I first drew breath." On the other hand, however, Hill’s real commitment to the South--and his real estrangement from Ireland and from most of its people--was now clear. For example, in his post-war letters Hill blamed the Confederacy’s defeat on the "tens of thousands" of Irish "mercenaries" who had helped the "accursed" Yankees "crush a people struggling for self-government regardless of anything but their filthy pay," and he was appalled that the Irish-American soldiers stationed in Abbeville "mingle with the Negroes with as much affinity as if of the same blood." To be sure, in 1867 Hill did visit Ireland briefly, for the first and only time since his emigration forty-five years earlier. But the letter he wrote to brother David, on his return to Abbeville, was so uncharacteristically devoid of sentiment as to suggest that his visit had been deeply disappointing, memorable only for "the cough [with] which I had been so much troubled" in a wet, cold climate to which he was now unaccustomed. Perhaps tellingly, it was only in this and subsequent letters that Hill first made reference to his wife of forty years!
Perhaps in 1867 William Hill finally came "home" to South Carolina, in a psychological as well as in a physical sense. Given the evolution of his own ethnic identity and nationalist sympathies--from Irish to white Southern--perhaps it was no wonder that, in the early twentieth century, his grand-daughter would write in a school essay that she was "of Scotch-Irish [not "Irish"] descent," although neither William Hill himself nor the authors of his obituaries ever employed the term. However, what is surprising is that apparently today, according to the 1990 Census, many of the present descendants of the William Hills--and of the hundreds of thousands of other Ulster Protestants who settled in the Old South--once again regard themselves as inclusively "Irish."