With St. Patrick’s Day upcoming, Dr. Richard Bell shares the contributions of the Irish in the American Revolution.

Giving testimony to the British Parliament in 1779, Joseph Galloway estimated that Irishmen composed perhaps one-half of the Continental Army. Five years later, after Washington’s army won the war, another expert witness told Parliament that “the Irish language was as commonly spoken in the American ranks as English” and that Irish valor “determined the contest.” While exaggerated, those claims contained an essential truth: that men of Irish heritage played crucial roles in fighting the American Revolution. Irish-Americans sided with the patriots against the British Army in overwhelming numbers and shouldered muskets at every significant military encounter over the eight long years of war. Their numbers included general, colonels, thousands of enlisted men, and even spies such as Hercules Mulligan, a major character in Hamilton: An American Musical. At the same time, people in Ireland faced their own choice: whether to join the British in the fight to preserve the empire, or find ways to undermine it and perhaps even assert their own independence on that side of the Atlantic. Join University of Maryland historian Dr. Richard Bell as he explores the Revolution from the perspective of both the Irish and their Irish-American cousins. 

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