Thus far we have been noting the arrival of Virginians from Tidewater. Rich or poor, great landowners or squatters, gentlemen of position and influence or the mere riff-raff of the settlements, with all the varying gradation between those extremes, they had at least in common their English blood and traditions and being the product of Virginia life, either through birth or years of residence. It is now time to consider other and wholly dissimilar strains which, during this period of early settlement, were coming into the newly opened country and which were to have such a lasting influence on its population.
As early as 1725 there was, it is said, a group of Irish immigrants which had established itself on the Virginia bank of the Potomac, opposite the mouth of the Monocacy. This particular cluster had come from Maryland having, perhaps, been attracted to the large grant between the Monocacy and the Point of Rocks which, before 1700, had been acquired by the first Charles Carroll, founder of his family in Maryland who, when he acquired the land on the Monocacy, was acting as Agent for Maryland's Proprietor, Lord Baltimore. Later his grandson, another Charles Carroll, inherited the grant, added greatly thereto, bestowed upon it the name of Carrollton Manor and in signing the _Declaration of Independence_ as Charles Carroll of Carrollton, gave it and himself immortality. The Carrolls were Irish and Roman Catholics; perhaps they had encouraged these newcomers to go out to their great holdings on the Monocacy where life could be begun anew and there was less danger of interference with their religion than in the strongly Protestant east. However, whether encouraged or not, our particular covey of Irish seem eventually to have crossed to the Virginia shore and there planted themselves with small formality and no title. All was wilderness on both sides of the Potomac. The matter of a legal title was probably the least of our adventurers' troubles.
In the first half-century following the founding of Jamestown, few Irish were to be encountered in Virginia. The Colony was overwhelmingly English with, it is true, occasional Welsh, Irish and Scotch here and there; but these were accidental and the basic and dominating race of the settlers was so wholly Anglo-Saxon that the few others were submerged and lost in the English flood. But between 1653 and 1660, hundreds of unfortunate Irish, resisting Cromwell, were shipped as political prisoners and little better than white slaves to Virginia and the other Colonies. Again, after the defeat in 1690 of James II and his Irish supporters by William III at the Battle of the Boyne and the resultant Treaty of Limerick the next year, great numbers of the Irish were banished or condemned to transportation and of these many were sent to Maryland and Virginia where as servants or labourers on the land, their services were in demand. While the majority thus transported were ignorant peasants, feudal vassals of their lords, the "Kerns and gallowglasses" of Macaulay, numbers of the nobility and gentry were exiled as well, of which we have already recorded a prominent example in Daniel McCarty. Inasmuch as those transported were so treated as punishment for their uprising in favour of James and against the de facto English government of William, they were stigmatized as criminals, although, as shown, their offense was purely political. But Irish offenders against the penal laws other than political were also from time to time condemned to transportation and as the demand for labourers by wealthier planters in Virginia grew and until negro slaves later were generally available to them, there was also much kidnapping of wholly innocent Irish who, too, were taken to the Colonies and sold into servitude. Among this heterogeneous mass of unfortunates there were undoubtedly many who were disorderly, depraved and vicious and who, we know, subsequently gave great trouble to the Virginians; but to classify all the Irish forcibly transported as criminals or lawless would be as unjust as it would be untrue. It well may be borne in mind that to most of the English, they were a strange, impulsive and foreign people and equally or even more damning, Romanists in an intensely anti-Roman community. As such, we may well believe, they seldom enjoyed the benefit of a doubt of their inherent depravity.