l and political ostracism, left Ireland for America
in the course of the eighteenth century, it is impossible to say; but
the number, both relatively to population and relatively to the total
emigration, Catholic and Protestant, to all parts of the world, was
undoubtedly very large. Mr. Egerton, in his "Origin and Growth of the
English Colonies," reckons that in 1775 a sixth part of the thirteen
insurrectionary Colonies was composed of Scots-Irish exiles from Ulster,
and that half the Protestant population of that Province emigrated to
those Colonies between 1730 and 1770. As the crisis approached,
emigration became an exodus. Thirty thousand of the farming class are
said to have been driven west by the wholesale evictions of the early
seventies, and ten thousand weavers followed them during the disastrous
depression in the linen trade caused by interruption of commerce with
America. The majority went to the northern Colonies, especially
Pennsylvania, took from the first a vehement stand against the Royal
claims, and supplied some of Washington's best soldiers. A minority went
to the backwoods of Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina, and were little
heard of until as late in the war as 1780, when Tarleton began his
anti-guerilla campaign in the South. Then they woke up, and became, like
their compatriots of the North, formidable and implacable foes.

Ireland and America, therefore, embarked on their struggle with the
English Parliament in close sympathy. The treatise of Molyneux on Irish
liberty was read with wide approval in America. Franklin visited and
encouraged the Irish patriots, and the Americans in 1775 issued a
special address to them, asserting an identity of interest. Chatham, on
the eve of war, dwelt strongly in the House of Lords upon the same
identity of interest, and in doing so expressly coupled together Irish
Catholics and Protestants.

Although united by interest and sentiment, Ireland and America entered
on the struggle under widely varying conditions. The American Colonies
were thirteen separate units, with only a rude organization for common
action, and in each of these units there existed a cleavage of opinion,
based neither on class nor creed, between rebels and loyalists. In spite
of this weakness, the revolt was thoroughly national in the sense that
it was organized and maintained through the State Assemblies, resting on
a broad popular franchise. In Ireland, unbought and unofficial opinion
was uni