Introduction
Ethnic groups are made in history and Irish Americans have been no exception. Irish Americans changed over time because people came to America from an Ireland which kept changing, because new generations of American-born Irish grew to maturity, and because the United States too kept changing. The American economy soared or crashed; the nation fought new wars; political parties rose and fell; and perhaps as important as anything else, new groups arrived in America and old ones were themselves remade, and thus whom Irish Americans could count as friends and whom they might suspect as enemies continued to change too. While Ireland would remain significant for most Irish Americans over the four centuries of their history, it would be an Ireland of their own imagining, an Ireland that they constructed to meet their own needs and carry their own hopes, and not necessarily an Ireland that the Irish themselves would recognise. That is because in response to changes within their own people as well as outside them in the American environment, they were, in fact, constantly constructing and reconstructing – inventing and reinventing – themselves over time too.
The Colonial and Revolutionary Eras
The first Irish came to North America in the mid-1580s as part of Walter Ralegh's colony planted on the Outer Banks of what is now North Carolina, but they and the colony were gone within a few years, and over the next century or more, few Irish would follow. Perhaps 3,300 Irish-born went to North America in the seventeenth century, a tiny number compared with the 147,000 English and Welsh who went there, or even the 50,000 Irish who went to the West Indies. The majority of these Irish in North America were indentured servants. Some of them had been shanghaied and shipped west after Cromwell's wars, but others, like most of the nearly 90,000 migrants who were servants from England, came of their own accord to seek new opportunities.
Immigration from Ireland to North America would be far larger in the eighteenth century. Because records of people leaving Ireland or arriving in the colonies are so fragmentary and inconsistent, we do not know exactly how much larger that migration actually was.