Freedom’s Sons and Daughters

The Stories of the Irish and George Washington

INTRODUCTION

There is no doubt that Ireland’s sons and daughters played a major role in the battle for American independence from the British Crown.

As leading Revolutionary War historian Thomas Fleming has noted, the Irish “responded en masse to the call for resistance to England. With more than 300,000 of them in the colonies, they had a major impact on the war.”

You would be hard-pressed to find an account of the full Irish commitment.

Historians have mainly ignored or rarely referenced their role. This is an opportunity to set the record straight.

As Philip Thomas Tucker, PhD, a prolific historian of the Revolutionary War writes: “For more than two centuries, what has been most forgotten about America’s stirring creation story were the crucial and disproportionate contributions that the Irish people played in the winning of the American Revolution.” 

What this book shows is that the impact of the Irish was not confined to war: it was the loving care given by Irish nurses to wounded soldiers; it was the cooking, cleaning, and laundry done by Irish camp followers that kept an army marching; it was the fearless advocacy for freedom from successful immigrant politicians and business leaders; it was the secret intelligence and spy work that resulted in great victories and disasters avoided. And yes, of course, there was the bravery of the men who fought at Bunker Hill, Princeton, Trenton, Yorktown, and all the great battle sites.

There is the closeness of Washington to the Irish, rarely revealed.

We will also see the social Washington—a beloved and frequent guest at the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick’s dinners or visiting with his favorite Irish bartender in a Delaware Irish pub. We will see him during formal occasions-dancing minuets and waltzes at the home of his great Irish friend General Henry Knox or wining and dining his Irish neighbors at Mount Vernon.

Of course, there was the famous Saint Patrick’s Day celebration in 1780 after a winter of discontent at Valley Forge, but there is also the story of how the Irish and German soldiers almost came to blows as Washington tried to intervene. The following year, Washington used Saint Patrick’s Day as the only day off of the year to uplift his men after a cruel winter.

It was an almost mystical bond between Washington and the Irish: the fierce commitment when they realized Washington was not anti-Irish Catholic like so many and was ready to die for his ideals; and the fact that he hated the common enemy, the British, as much as they did.

Indeed, in one case, we find Washington marveling at the ornate statuary at a Catholic mass he attended and wondering why he wasn’t more drawn to the religion.

Battlefield generals and ordinary soldiers fought with rare fury for him. The obscure tailor Hercules Mulligan became a master spy, one so good that CIA Chief William Casey once wondered if he wasn’t the greatest American spy of all. Mary Travers, a beloved nurse, became an angel of the camps. Elizabeth Thompson became Washington’s housekeeper at the age of seventy-two, and he was devoted to her.

There is also the story of men like Washington’s Chief Aide John Fitzgerald whose riveting account of crossing the Delaware with Washington provided an incredible eyewitness account of perhaps the most important moment in America’s history.

George Washington and the Irish will show the bravery of the Irishmen who knew they could be signing their death warrants when they printed and signed the Declaration of Independence. For many, it was revenge for what the British had done to them in their own country.

We will also highlight the story of James Hoban, the unknown Irish architect who had a chance encounter with Washington and ended up designing the White House.

This book, then, is the largely untold story of how the Irish played a decisive part in helping George Washington defeat the British in perhaps the most significant war in history—a war where democracy was first forged and the divine right of kings to rule was forever ended. It also dispels the myths that few Irish Catholics fought. There were ten thousand Irish names on the Continental Army muster rolls at the beginning of the war and many more joined.

There were also, of course, thousands of Scots Irish Presbyterians, themselves forced to leave Ireland because of the draconian Penal Laws that forbid any religion but Anglican, also known as the Church of England. Among those who fought were the teenage son of Irish immigrants, Andrew Jackson, and Kate Barry, daughter of Irish immigrants, who became a legendary figure.

We will relay the extraordinary experiences of ordinary people at the time, witnesses to history like the Irish man who took care of Benjamin Franklin in his later years and who witnessed the final embrace between Washington and Franklin. We will also read Franklin’s prescient letter from Ireland.

There is also the extraordinary tale of how the iconic Washington painting we are all so familiar with, the one used on the one dollar bill, was first dreamt up by a prisoner in an Irish debtor’s jail.

We also have an Irish rogue’s gallery with these pages, including the Irish major general who was the leader in a plot to see Washington replaced and possibly eliminated after early losses. The first traitor in American history to be hanged was Irish, as well.

The scope of George Washington and the Irish covers the numerous generals and lieutenants from Ireland that Washington had under his command and his complete familiarity with the Irish situation, which he likened to Americans trying to roust the British.

He could hardly have been unaware of the importance of the Irish to him.

According to Christopher Klein, writing on History. com: “Generals born in Ireland or who had Irish parents commanded seven of the eleven brigades wintering in Morristown.”

So this book covers the Revolutionary War contributions of ordinary men and women who never wrote down their history and involvement in events— many indeed were illiterate to begin with. Those who wrote the history hardly bothered with the immigrants, anyway; they were viewed by most with a severely jaundiced eye. Many were indentured servants essentially owned by their masters until they paid them back for their passage to America.

So the stories of how the Irish fought for, died for, bled for, and won massive naval battles for George Washington are generally untold, as is the story of the Cork soldier who first referred to the “United States of America.” The heroism of the Scots Irish in the war is also revealed.

There are, also, extraordinarily uplifting stories.

When Washington was elected president, the Continental Congress sent an Irishman from Derry, Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Congress (in essence the speaker), to inform him. The fact that Thomson had arrived in America as a penniless orphan makes his story all the more remarkable.

We will also deal with the issue of slavery and the Irish, and the sad realization that many Irish, despite their own background of oppression, were sadly lacking any insight into how dreadful slavery was, though there were many honorable exceptions.

Charles Thomson, for instance, did more than free slaves; he hired Black labor and allowed them to work their own shareholding lands and provided decent accommodation for them.

Twelve American presidents owned slaves, which, alas, was the wretched context of the times, but many of the Irish seemed indifferent to the awful mistreatment of slaves.

The military contribution has long been omitted but that is changing. As historian Phillip Thomas Tucker puts it: “So many Irish served in the ranks of the Pennsylvania Continental Line, the backbone of Washington’s Continental Army and one [of] its largest units, that this hard-fighting unit was correctly known as the ‘Line of Ireland.”

We have the singular testimony of the famed Virginia cavalryman “Light Horse Harry” Lee (father of Robert E. Lee) who said the Irish line was “singularly fitted for close and stubborn action, hand to hand, in the center of the army, and always preferred an appeal to the bayonet to a toilsome march.” Another officer said of them: “They served everywhere and surrendered nowhere.”

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Historian Michael O’Brien, after exhaustive research, reckoned 38 percent of Washington’s Army was Irish or Scots Irish. O’Brien produced evidence from Revolutionary muster rolls that there were 695 Kellys in the American army, 494 Murphys, 331 McCarthys, 327 Connors or O’Connors, 322 Ryans, and 248 Doughertys – and that was before other common names were counted.

Yet the Irish have been shut out of Revolutionary War history as it has been written by grandees who had no time for the immigrants and their spawn. Anti-Catholicism ran rampant but there never was a harsh word on a person’s religion from Washington, it must be noted.

As historian Thomas Fleming notes: “Henry Cabot Lodge tried to claim that the revolutionaries in Massachusetts were ‘of almost pure English blood, with a small infusion of Scotch Irish from Londonderry.” Actually, Historian O’Brien found three thousand unquestionably Irish names on the state’s revolutionary muster rolls-and not one Lodge.

So the numbers speak for themselves. The glorious chapter of the Irish in the fight for democracy has never been fully told. This book is not an exhaustive “who’s who” of everyone who fought or led (or it would be as long as the bible) but an overdue account of the importance of Erin’s sons and daughters in achieving that most vital of victories. It also highlights the rarely revealed unbreakable link between Washington and his Irish comrades; something, ironically, the British grasped as Lord Mountjoy’s quote that opened the book shows.

On far foreign fields, the soldiers and chiefs of the Irish brigades fought and died, but their contribution was never greater than helping create the dawn of democracy. Born into oppression, they became freedom’s sons and daughters. ♦

George Washington and the Irish: Incredible Stories of the Irish Spies, Soldiers, and Workers Who Helped Free America is available for purchase from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

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Niall O’Dowd is the co-founder of Irish America magazine as well as the founder of the Irish Voice Newspaper and Irishcentral.com. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by University College Dublin for his work on the Irish peace process which was the subject of a book “Daring Diplomacy” and a PBS Special “An Irish Voice.” He is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University Journalism School.

Niall is also the author of Lincoln and the Irish: “The Untold Story of How the Irish Helped Abraham Lincoln Save the Union. Lincoln and the Irish is published by Skyhorse Publishing (February 2018 / 224 pp. / $24.99). Read an excerpt from that book here.

Niall’s most recent book, “A New Ireland: How Europe’s Most Conservative Country Became its Most Liberal” was published in March 2020 and is available from Skyhorse Publishing.