ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly sketches the history of early Irish migration to the Old South, relying primarily on the emigrants' own letters, memoirs, and other writings, before returning at the end to employ similar sources to provide some biographical illustrations of the complexity and mutability of Irish ethnic identities in that region. Of the one-quarter to one-third of a million Irish who emigrated to North America between 1700 and the American Revolution most of them Ulster Presbyterians, perhaps half settled eventually in the southern colonies. The Irish-stock proportions of the populations of individual southern states ranged from 17-18 per cent in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina to as high as one-third in Kentucky and Tennessee, while in Georgia and South Carolina the Irish comprised slightly over one-quarter of their white inhabitants. In Ballynure parish, 85 per cent of the inhabitants had been Presbyterians, only 5 per cent Catholics.
