ABSTRACT
While popular legend holds that mass emigration from Ireland commenced with the Great Famine of the 1840s, the Irish migration to America actually began in the seventeenth century and assumed the character of a mass movement as early as 1720. An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people, three-quarters of them Catholics, left Ireland for the American colonies in the seventeenth century, and as many as 100,000 Catholic Irish may have come to America in the century after 1700. Virtually no evidence has survived on these Catholic settlers, however. Mainly young, single, rootless males, they seem to have blended into the general population rather than establishing themselves as a separate ethnic group in America. A great deal more is known about the remaining Irish immigrants of the eighteenth century, some 250,000 to 400,000 Protestants who crossed the Atlantic for the American colonies, about three-quarters of them Presbyterians from the northern province of Ulster. 1
