Monolingual irish11/30/2022 However, from the 1730s through the early 1770s many of them, with their American-born offspring, moved south down the Great Path into the Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia backcountries, where they met others who had disembarked at Charleston or Savannah. (Yet another 25,000 Irish migrants, mostly Catholics, were convicts sent to the southern colonies.) Most of the Scots-Irish and others initially settled in the middle colonies. Many Presbyterian farmers could afford to transport entire families, but most Protestant artisans and laborers-and nearly all Catholic migrants-emigrated as indentured servants, bound to labor in America for three to five years in return for their passages. Voyages from Ulster typically lasted eight to ten weeks, and the costs of passage and provisions ranged between 9 pounds and 3 pounds 5 shillings. Dickson identified four major phases of Ulster Presbyterian migration to prerevolutionary America: 1717 to 1720, when several clergymen led entire congregations to New England 1725 to 1729, when some 8,000 Scots-Irish disembarked at or near Philadelphia and, in lesser numbers, at Charleston 1730 to 1769, when perhaps 70,000 Presbyterians left Ulster, primarilyįor the Delaware River and 1770 to 1775, when Ulster emigration, mostly to Philadelphia and to the Deep South, peaked at 40,000 or more. Thus nineteenth-century America's "Scotch-Irish" community would include many Protestants whose ancestors had been Catholics or Anglicans. Most Catholics and Anglicans who did cross the Atlantic were subsumed in the Scots-Irish migration, and the dearth of priests and chapels in the colonies promoted the absorption of Catholic emigrants into Presbyterian sociocultural networks. #Monolingual irish freeAlthough indentured servitude enabled Ireland's poor to obtain free transatlantic passages, the great majority of Irish Catholics-still monolingual Irish-speakers-were insulated from America's attractions as promoted by newspapers and shipping agents. However, Catholics and Anglicans were relatively reluctant to migrate to America-the former because legal discrimination in Britain's colonies reinforced archaic Catholic notions that emigration (at least to Protestant countries) was tantamount to exile or banishment, the latter because of their privileged position in Ireland and the empire. Perhaps 60 percent of the total were Ulster Presbyterians (or Scots-Irish) a fifth to a fourth were Catholics from both Ulster and southern Ireland, and (despite continued Quaker migration) most of the remainder were Anglicans, members of the legally established Church of Ireland.īetween 17 Catholic settlement in Newfoundland increased and migration to the West Indies diminished. Of the migrants to the New World, about three-fourths left from Ulster, and the remainder from commercialized and anglicized areas in southern Ireland. Moreover, at least 150,000 Irish migrated to North America, although some historians (Cullen, Wokeck) suggest that they numbered merely 60,000. Some 88,000 military and nonmilitary migrants left Ireland for Europe or Britain or to work for the British East India Company (Cullen). In the period 1700 to 1775 perhaps 25,000 Britons settled in Ireland (Canny, Landsman). The frequent wars, famines, and economic crises of the seventeenth century were the principal causes of these migrations.īetween 1700 and the American Revolution, movement from Ireland greatly exceeded migration to Ireland, and North America prevailed among overseas destinations. Also, the 1680s and 1690s witnessed the start of Irish Protestant migration to North America, as Ulster Presbyterians migrated to the Chesapeake, while Irish Quakers and Baptists sailed to Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Smaller numbers of Catholic servants and convicts disembarked in the Chesapeake region, and a few seasonal migrants from east Munster-servants and laborers on the Grand Banks fisheries-settled permanently in Newfoundland. Most of that last group were Catholics-primarily indentured servants, rebels, or "vagabonds"-transported to the British West Indies. Perhaps 250,000 English, Welsh, and Scottish Protestants settled in Ireland (Canny, Smout), whereas about 50,000 Catholic soldiers and others left the island, primarily for Europe (Cullen), and perhaps as many again emigrated to the Americas. The higher numbers remain credible, however, and other historians (e.g., Bríc and Kirkham) suggest that even these may be too low.ĭuring the 1600s migration to Ireland exceeded emigration from Ireland. Recent scholarship (e.g., by Cullen and Wokeck) has revised steeply downward older estimates (e.g., by Dickson) of eighteenth-century migration to North America. The number of Irish who emigrated prior to the Great Famine (1845–1852) is uncertain and disputed. Emigration from the Seventeenth Century to 1845
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