Irish American
By Dr William P Kelly, University of Ulster
The story of the Ulster Catholics in North America, like their Scots-Irish compatriots is a story of four centuries of phenomenal success and failure, born of various political, religious, cultural, geographical, and economic considerations.
Countless thousands of Irishmen served as labourers, fishermen, carters and miners in the burgeoning industrial meat-grinder of the American Industrial Revolution.
Ulster Catholics manned the canal networks, they sifted coal, copper, anthracite, and steel in the Vulcan forges of Birmingham, Alabama, and in the infernal shafts of the Annaconda Mining Company in Butte, Montana.
They helped to police the streets of America’s industrial cities, towns and shantytowns, doused its fires and ministered to the educational, health, welfare and spiritual needs of its burgeoning Catholic flocks. Ulster Catholic men and women filled the ranks of the priests, nuns and religious orders.
Their contribution to victory in the War of Independence has received less scrutiny than the deservedly renowned role of their Scots-Irish compatriots. However, it is manifest in the numerous Ulster Catholic names which pepper the congressional army muster rolls.
Thousands more fought in the Union and Confederate armies during the American Civil War. They filled the ranks of the legendary New York ‘Fighting 69th’, the 112th and 116th Pennsylvania Regiment (Union) and 1st Virginia, 10th Tennissee and the Louisiana Tigers, the hammer of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. These regiments and companies were led with distinction by soldiers such as Patrick Henry O’Rourke 
of Rorty, and St. Clair Augustine Mulholland, of Lisburn, Co. Antrim, Congressional Medal winner and subsequently police-chief of Philadelphia.
Archbishop John Hughes (1797-1864), Annaloghan, Co. Tyrone, 1st Archbishop of New York and founder of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, played a leading role in the evolution of Irish Catholic institutions and the formation of the Irish American identity. He played Moses to the downcast, despised Irish immigrants, leading them into the Promised Land of American life. He encouraged the Irish to vote, building a century-old Democratic powerbase centred on New York. He preached the gospel of self-help and self-improvement, and showed that education and communal solidarity provided the readiest exits from the ghettoes of Five Points and the other degrading slums of Gotham.
When civil war broke out in 1861 he favoured gradual emancipation but sided with the north and toured Europe to garner support for the Union.
South of the Mason-Dixon Line, his compatriot Bishop Patrick Neison Lynch of South Carolina (1817-1882), served President Jefferson Davis as Confederate Emissary to the Holy See and attempted to stem the tide of Irish recruitment to the Union cause. He defended the southern cause against his old friend Hughes of New York and encouraged the Irish Catholic hierarchy to support the south.
Others rode the iron horse of colonial expansion and American ‘manifest destiny’ through the lands of the Apache, Sioux and Cheyenne as soldiers and scouts and Native American ‘agents’.
Their women worked as cooks, cleaners, nannies and servants in the houses of the ‘quality’, tended the young, sick, ‘fallen’, invalid and infirm. Despite their immersion and incorporation into this enormous industrial, military and economic powerhouse, they succeeded in retaining many of their cultural traits and identities; music, languages, literatures, religion, sport and the arts. Many scaled the dizzy heights of national, state and city politics, while never forgetting their love of Ireland. They flocked into the ranks of political confraternities, benevolent societies and revolutionary oraganizations.
Ulster Irish men and women also made major contributions to industry, welfare, philanthropy, arts and culture. Ulster Catholics made and lost fortunes in the claims, creeks, seams and wildernesses of Alaska, Colorado, California and Montana. Their story has been colourfully and sympathetically recorded by Mici Mac Gabhainn who charts their progress from Butte, Montana to the wildernesses of Klondike and The Yukon.
They include Marcus Daly, ‘The Copper King’, owner of the Annaconda Mining Company, and proprietor of the influential Anaconda Standardone. He raised a monument to Thomas Francis Meagher, ‘Meagher of the Sword’ , Colonel of the Irish Brigade and first governor of Montana.
Ulster Irish men and women were pioneers in those twin pillars of American society: education and social welfare. Mary Baptist Purcell (1829-1898), the Newry-born social worker, administrator, religious leader and educator, established St. Mary’s, the first Catholic hospital on the West Coast, homes for the elderly and elementary schools. Her nuns are fondly remembered for heroically tending to the victims of the cholera and smallpox epidepics of 1857 and 1868.
Mary Thomas McSwiggin, Co. Tyrone (1818-77), ‘The Florence Nightingale of Louisiana’, persuaded General Bengamin Butler, USA, to allow her to minister to the needy orphans. Greatly esteemed by the states’s inhabitants of all denominations, the local rabbi and Presbyterian ministers asked their congregations to pray for her during her final illness.
Cardinal John Farley (1842-1918), Newtownhamilton, Co. Armagh, provided pastoral care to various ethnic groups in New York. He raised Fordham to University status, founded numerous high schools and and succeeded in de-politicizing St. Patrick’s Day parade. John Edward Gunn (1863-1924), Bishop of Mississippi, born in Fivemiletown, Co. Tyrone, spent much of his episcopate ministering to the needs of poor African and Native Americans.
Charles McKenna (1835-1917), Fallafen, Co. Londonderry, of the Rosary Confraternity of the Holy Name Society, ministered to freed slaves and prompted the founding of the first church for freed slaves in New York city. Hugh O’Brien, Maguire’s-Bridge, Co. Fermanagh, editor, publisher and philanthropist became the first Irish Catholic Mayor of Boston, a tradition of Irish Catholic involvement in the politics of Boston which would have its apogee with the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy to the Presidency of the United States of America.
The two communities from Northern Ireland combined down the years on the great American issues. Often people from the same background emerged on competing sides, but their contribution to the development of the US is widely viewed with a great deal of pride and satisfaction.
