“An Empire is an aggregate of many states,” Edmund Burke informed the British House of Commons on March 22, 1775. On that day, Burke pleaded for conciliation with America. He beseeched supporters of Lord North’s government to think “more in favor of prudent management, than of force” in the quest to keep America for King George III. Having ignored Burke’s warning for seven years, the House on March 20, 1782, accepted North’s resignation and with it defeat in America. Burke’s call for conciliation went unheeded. But his insight into empire illuminates how American independence both engulfed the world in its struggle and influenced the world by its example. 

　　King George mobilized the “aggregate” of his imperial subjects against the American rebels. One Continental Army officer worried the King was “arming every hand, Protestant and Catholic, English, Irish, Scotch, Hanoverian, Hessians, Indians, Canadians.”

　　Most striking is the military contribution of Ireland, Burke’s birthplace and George’s “other kingdom.” A sixth of the King’s soldiers and a third of his officers who fought in America were Irish-born. Three of his four commanders-in-chief were Irish aristocrats. Down the ranks, the best memoir written by an enlisted British soldier comes from Roger Lamb, a Dublin-born sergeant in a Welsh regiment.

　　The motley assortment of nations that fought for King George is more than a historical curiosity. Following Irishmen in redcoats helps us to grasp the global scale and consequence of the American Revolution, which was in part a struggle for the fate of an empire. The contributions of Irish bases, officers, and troops to King George’s cause helped to ensure the fight for America was long, bitter, and narrowly decided. But the American war also transformed Ireland’s place in the King’s empire. It birthed a radical struggle for Irish independence from Britain, which instead resulted in union with Britain. We should consider, in this year of semiquincentennial commemorations, not only how the Revolution made America but also how America’s fight for freedom swept across the world. Its legacy includes the lost causes it inspired, and nowhere more so than in Ireland.

　　“We skulk under the protection of England,” complained Wolfe Tone, a Protestant leader of the revolutionary Society of United Irishmen in the 1790s. Tone lamented: “The name of Ireland is never heard; for England and not our country we fight and die.” Tone’s critique was misplaced. The American Revolution exposed England’s dependence on Ireland’s subordinate, but separate, military power. Ireland maintained an army of 15,000 men. They were organized under Ireland’s lord lieutenant (viceroy), who governed from Dublin Castle, funded by Ireland’s Parliament located a mile away at College Green, and mostly quartered in Dublin’s vast barracks complex. The Crown used Ireland as an expeditionary base throughout the eighteenth century. Irish troops deployed to quell Jacobites in Scotland, campaign in India, and fight the French in America. When General Edward Braddock and his young aide George Washington launched their doomed Fort Duquesne expedition in 1755 during the French and Indian War, Irish regiments formed the backbone of their army. Ireland’s military defended both Ireland and the empire.

　　America emerged from the imperial struggle independent from Britain. Ireland emerged fastened to it.

　　After the first shot rang out from Concord, Massachusetts in April 1775, Irish troops deployed to staunch the rebellion. Six Irish regiments reinforced General Thomas Gage in Boston in the winter of 1774–75. In early 1776, sixteen regiments were sailing from Ireland for Boston and Canada. By comparison, Gage and his successor, General William Howe, commanded eighteen regiments in besieged Boston. After evacuating Boston, Howe received an influx of Irish troops before his New York expedition in August 1776. These reinforcements were crucial. Gage commanded 8,000 men dispersed across frontier forts when the war began. The King’s army altogether could muster 49,000 men. As the process of enlisting recruits and hiring German regiments slowly unfolded, the largest force immediately available was in Ireland. Three-quarters of Ireland’s garrison deployed to America. Their arrival enabled Crown forces to defend Canada and capture New York, reasserting royal power after its collapse across the thirteen colonies. As in previous emergencies, ministers used Ireland’s army to meet a mounting crisis.

　　Besides providing a base of operations, Ireland offered a source of soldiers. Irish Catholic recruitment, nominally prohibited until 1774, intensified before and during the American Revolution as the Crown struggled to meet manpower demands. Changes began during the Seven Years War. One British commander in that conflict estimated nearly half his troops were Irish, and the prime minister acknowledged that regiments recruited in Ireland included Catholics. Short of men in 1775, Lord Germain, the minister responsible for military strategy in America, sought proposals “to recruit the regiments from Irish Roman Catholics.”

　　Germain enjoyed some success: besides Irish regiments operating in America, sixteen British regiments were replenished by Irish troops. The Londonderry Journal reported, “two-thirds of the sailors who defended Quebec were Irish.” Further reflecting the Royal Navy’s Irish presence, Gaelic poet and navy gunner Owen Roe Sullivan celebrated Admiral George Rodney’s victory at the Saintes as belonging to “Rodney’s guns and Paddy’s sons.” After France entered the war in 1778 and fighting spread to South Asia, the East India Company recruited so many Irishmen that by war’s end, a third of its army was Irish-born. Irish-Americans were also recruited. General Henry Clinton, Howe’s successor, decided to target “sources from whence the rebels themselves drew most of their best soldiers—I mean the Irish … who had settled in America.” Clinton hoped to “work upon the national attachment” of Irish-Americans by placing them under Irish officers. He accordingly chose Lord Francis Rawdon to command a new regiment: the Volunteers of Ireland. Leading them in South Carolina, Rawdon released a teenage Irish-American rebel, Andrew Jackson, from captivity in 1781.

　　Irish recruitment provoked mixed responses. One English general branded Irish troops “incorrigible, ill-mannered, and unkempt.” Another derided “recruits taken out of Irish jails.” A German officer complained that Rawdons men committed “the grossest highway robberies.” Irish opinion about serving in America itself ranged from tepid to hostile. Recruiting parties were attacked in Dublin. An approaching departure for America could trigger mass desertion: four Irish regiments in 1776 lost 400 men after being ordered to embark. Irish troops were an indispensable, if imperfect, manpower source.

　　The Irish presence was even more pronounced in the officer corps. Historian Corelli Barnett considered Ireland’s gentry “Irish Junkers,” analogous to Prussia’s bellicose nobility. Almost three-fifths of military-age men from Irish gentry families were officers. Among senior commanders, Gage and Howe were sons of Irish noblemen, Guy Carleton and Rawdon were born in Ulster, and a young Charles Cornwallis lived in Dublin while his father served as lord lieutenant. General Charles O’Hara, immortalized capitulating to General Benjamin Lincoln in John Trumbull’s Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, was the son of an Irish field marshal and grandson of Ireland’s commander in chief.

　　Irish officers stirred Irish interest in the war. Carleton’s Irish correspondents published his praise for the Royal Irish Artillery. Finn’s Leinster Journal commended Rawdon’s Irish-Americans for displaying “bravery of veterans” at the battle of Camden. Bonfires celebrated Rawdon’s successes in Derry and Limerick. Dublin granted him freedom of the city. Newspapers reported the recovery of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, son of the Duke of Leinster, from his battle wounds. Popular pride in Irish officers helped sustain Irish interest in the fight for America. Irish support for the King’s war, however, was another matter.

　　Many Irishmen fought against American independence. Many more, however, became convinced that Ireland should emulate America. Conflict between Crown and colonies impressed on Irishmen their shared grievances with Americans. Legislatures in Ireland and America resented Westminster’s assertions of supremacy. The 1720 Declaratory Act claimed the right “to bind the kingdom and people of Ireland.” The 1766 Declaratory Act claimed the right “to bind the colonies and people of America,” adding “in all cases whatsoever.” John Dickinson’s 1768 Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania presented Ireland, “that poor kingdom,” as the Americans’ future if London succeeded in subduing colonial assemblies. An Irish pamphlet warned Americans that “the same arts which may be capable of destroying our liberties, must certainly operate more strongly against yours.” The standoff between Crown and colonies in the 1760s and early 1770s invigorated Irish interest in their suppressed rights. After Lexington and Concord, the example of American resistance and the strain it imposed on British power emboldened Irishmen to try to wrest back these rights.

　　Britain’s problems in America were Ireland’s opportunity. The specter of French invasion stimulated “Volunteer” organizations across Ireland. A self-governing citizen militia, the Volunteers swelled to 60,000 members and dwarfed the army garrison, already depleted by American service. Most Volunteers, according to the lord lieutenant, were “tradesmen or farmers” able to “furnish themselves with Arms and Uniforms.” They troubled the British far more than the French. The Enniskillen Volunteers toasted in 1779: “May the King’s evil counselors be speedily brought to the block.” Later that year, Volunteers descended on Parliament in Dublin with cannons and a placard declaring: “free trade or this.” Less ominous but no less effective, Volunteers helped organize a boycott of English goods modeled after American colonists’ non-importation agreements.

　　Despite their different endings, Ireland and America were part of the same revolutionary story.

　　Encouraged and pressured by the Volunteers, the Irish Commons demanded free trade and rejected army appropriations. Fearing “a fatal quarrel,” Lord North conceded greater Irish access to British colonial trade. Success quieted the Volunteers briefly. Cornwallis’ defeat at Yorktown spurred a massive Volunteer convention to repeal the Declaratory Act, which prompted the Irish Commons to pass a “Declaration of Irish Rights” demanding legislative independence. Belfast was a “perfect Boston,” reported an alarmed Anglican bishop. A war-weary Westminster acceded to Irish demands in 1782, renouncing the Declaratory Act and disavowing any ambition to legislate for Ireland. 

　　This “constitution of 1782” was hailed by Volunteers as Irish “independence.” America had forced Britain to acknowledge its national sovereignty. Through the same imperial crisis, the Volunteers believed they had compelled Britain to recognize Ireland’s equality as a sister-kingdom in King George’s crown. Burke cautioned his countrymen not to overdraw the parallels between their victory and that of the Americans, warning “this affair, so far from ended, is but just begun.” He deemed “the old link” between Britain and Ireland “snapped asunder.” Its replacement had not yet emerged. Volunteer demands to consolidate Ireland’s equality, namely an Anglo-Irish trade agreement, reform of Ireland’s patronage-dominated Parliament, and “emancipation” of Catholics from discriminatory legislation, went unfulfilled. Controlling patronage, commanding an army, and enjoying support from most Protestant elites, the Westminster-appointed lord lieutenant remained the cynosure of Irish politics. A gulf widened between the rhetoric of Irish “independence” and the reality of British influence.

　　Both Irish radicals seeking complete independence and British statesmen determined to renew “the old link” endeavored to resolve the Anglo-Irish rift opened by the American Revolution. American connections influenced Irish reactions to the French Revolution in 1789. Describing his reception in Ireland to George Washington, Thomas Paine observed, “The same fate follows me here as I at first experienced in America, strong friends and violent enemies.” Paine’s Rights of Man, which repurposed the anti-monarchical invective of Common Sense to defend the French Revolution, sold 200,000 copies in Ireland. Wolfe Tone considered Rights of Man “the Koran of Belfast.” Tone’s fellow United Irishmen honored with a drinking song “The mighty Thomas Paine/Who freedom did maintain/With energy and reason and sense.” Alongside Tone in the United Irish leadership was Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who returned from fighting the Americans, imbued with American ideas. Buttressed by promises of French support, the United Irishmen conspired to crown the “Constitution of 1782” with an independent Irish republic.

　　Their efforts culminated in a bloody but abortive rebellion in 1798. Frightened by further upheaval, the Irish Parliament passed an Act of Union with Britain in 1800, surrendering the independence it gained in 1782. Henceforth, Westminster alone would legislate for Britain and Ireland. The Anglo-Irish rift was closed not with Irish independence but Irish absorption into a new United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

　　Whether they fought against or were inspired by American independence, the conduct of Irishmen shows us that the Revolutionary War was a global imperial struggle in which separation from Britain or greater subordination to it were real possibilities in America and in Ireland. The path taken by one could have been followed by the other. On one hand, Irish soldiers, officers, and bases helped King George to dispute, and at times come close to denying, American independence. On the other hand, the first shot at Concord carried the promise of independence not only for Americans but for Irishmen. America emerged from the imperial struggle independent from Britain. Ireland emerged fastened to it, stoking tensions that erupted in an even bloodier Irish War of Independence in 1919.

　　Despite their different endings, Ireland and America were part of the same revolutionary story. As Americans commemorate two hundred and fifty years of freedom, they should remember how their struggle was shaped on the world stage and appreciate how their example inspired the world, even in its lost causes.