American Revolution

American Revolution. The military struggle associated with this term lasted from 1775 to 1781 on the American mainland, although the formal peace was not signed until 1783. More generously defined, the origins of the Revolution are commonly found in the period after the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, and a possible conclusion can be seen in 1789 when George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States under the constitution which had been constructed in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. As a result of the successful revolutionary war the United States emerged as an independent country, and so the ‘first’ British empire ended.

Among the important writings associated with the Revolution are some which resonated outside North America as well as within it. Most obviously there is the Declaration of Independence itself, essentially the work of Thomas Jefferson, written and published in 1776, the same year as Tom Paine's Common Sense. The United States constitution received its best‐known defence in the Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. The first ten amendments to the constitution, 1789, usually known as the Bill of Rights, have also had an important domestic and international role in the history of civil liberties.

The evidence suggests that a majority of those in the colonies from an Irish background supported the revolutionary, patriot cause. These included such prominent figures, among many others, as John Dunlop (born in Co. Tyrone), the printer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Thomson (born in Co. Londonderry), the leader of the radical movement in Philadelphia and then secretary to the Continental Congress, and Aedanus Burke (born in Co. Galway) of South Carolina, who was a particularly prominent opponent of the federal constitution at the time of its ratification, 1787–8. The state in which immigrants from Ireland were in sufficient numbers to achieve effective political mobilization as a group was Pennsylvania. Here, in Philadelphia but more importantly in some of the then western counties of the state, there is evidence of a distinctively radical position on a number of issues. These include strong commitment to the Revolution in a state where there was particularly significant support for the loyalist cause, support for the state constitution of 1776 with its unicameral legislature and generous franchise, and in 1787 hostility to the new United States constitution. It has been argued that the predominantly Presbyterian settlers from Ireland were politically allied to Calvinists from other backgrounds in the state.

As the American crisis developed during the 1760s and 1770s, many on both sides of the Atlantic saw parallels between the grievances of the colonists and those of Ireland. The withdrawal of regular troops for service in North America, along with the threat of French or Spanish invasion, provided the occasion for the formation of the Volunteers, whose extra‐parliamentary pressure was crucial to the achievement of free trade and legislative independence. Moderate Irish patriots became less sympathetic as the colonists progressed from demands for representation to republicanism and the pursuit of independence, although in radical circles, particularly in Presbyterian Ulster, support for the American cause remained significant throughout.

Bibliography

Doyle, D. N. , Ireland, Irishmen and Revolutionary American 1760–1820 (1981)

S. J. S. Ickringill