d not have been ensigns of marching
regiments or freemen of petty corporations."

The old Irish brigades ended with the French monarchy. Battalions of
the regiments of Dillon and Walsh were with the French fleet in the
West Indies at Grenada and St. Eustache, also at Savannah, and under
Rochambeau at Yorktown, but, except as to the officers, the surviving
regiments of Berwick, Dillon, and Walsh were largely French. With the
better times under Grattan's Parliament in Ireland, the soldier
emigration to France had all but ceased. The Irish Volunteers of 1782
numbered 100,000 men, of whom an appreciable proportion were
Catholics. Many Irish went into the English army and navy, but there
was another stream of fighting emigrants, that which flocked to the
standard of revolt against England in America, of which much was to
be heard thereafter.

In the American colonies before the Revolution there were thousands
of descendants of the Catholic Irish who had settled in Maryland and
Pennsylvania during the seventeenth century, as well as hardy Irish
Presbyterians from Ulster, who came in great multitudes during the
first half of the eighteenth century. They had suffered persecution
in Ireland for conscience sake from their fellow-Protestants. In
Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas
they constituted entire communities. The emigration of the Catholic
or purely Celtic Irish to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries was often compulsory. At any rate, after the middle of the
eighteenth century it was large and became continuous--a true drift.
Catholics and Presbyterians alike brought hostility to the English
government with them, and their voices fed the storm of discontent.
The Irish schoolmasters, of whom there were hundreds, were especially
efficient in this. They came in every ship to the colonies. They had
no love for England, for they had experienced in Ireland the tyranny
of English law, and they would be more than human if they did not
imbue the minds of the American children under their care with their
own hatred of oppression and wrong and English domination. The log
schoolhouse of the Irish teacher became the nursery of revolution.
They were a very important factor, therefore, in the making of the
Revolution, and many of them took an active part as soldiers in the
field.

The Irish, both Catholics and Protestants, poured into the patriot
ranks once the standard of revolt was r