IRISH
148
IRISH
III. In Canada. — The parish registers show that
the Irish race was fairly well represented in New
France, even in the early years of this colony. O'Far-
rell, in his " Irish Families in Ancient Quebec Records "
(Montreal, 1872; 1908), asserts that of the 2500 fami-
lies that made up the population of Lower Canada at
the close of the seventeenth century, wellnigh one
hundred families were natives of Ireland, and in
about thirty other cases the husband or ■wife was of
Irish birth. But these numbers would seem to be
exaggerated. A careful study of Mgr Tanguay's
"Dictionnaire genealogique " (7 volumes, Montreal,
1871), lietween 1625 and 1700, reveals thirty or forty
names like Kelly, Casey, Murphy, Leahy, and others
equally Celtic in sound. Mary ivirwin,"the daughter
of an Irish family who fled to France to preserve the
Faith, came to Canada in 1643, and died a nun in
the Hotel-Dieu, Quebec, in 1687. Tanguay makes
special mention of an Irishman, Teigue Cornelius
O'Brenuan, who married a French wife, Jeanne
Chartier, at Quebec, in 1670. These two are the an-
cestors of the Aubrys and other families still promi-
nent in the Province of Quebec.
The conflict on American soil between the armies of France and England, in the eighteenth century, brought many Irish soldiers to Canada. Some had enlisted in the service of France; others had been taken prisoners by the French; others were deserters from the EngUsh ranks. The President of the Na\-y Board, at Paris, in a letter to the Canadian Inten- dants, de la Galissonniere and Hocquart, in 1748, wrote: "If the Irish Catholics, taken prisoners to Canada, ask to remain, the King of France sees no difficulty in their being allowed to do so. The man- ner in which the English treat their nation ought not to cause them to regret such a change." Desertion was a very common practice in the eighteenth cen- tury among the Irish soldiers who were pressed into the English armies, or whose misery at home obliged them to enlist. The author of "The Irish Brigades in the Service of France " gives instances of such de- sertions to the famous corps of their countrj-men in France, where they might enjoy the exercise of their reUgion then interdicted in the British army, and, further, "that they might obtain in battle some of the vengeance then due for the many oppressions and insults so long inflicted on their creed and race". The Protestant Lord Primate of Ireland, in a letter from Dublin, in 1730, to the Duke of Newcastle, wrote: "All recruits raised here are generally con- sidered as persons that may, some time or other, pay a visit to this country as enemies. That those who are enlisted here . . . hope and wish to do so, there is no doubt." This spirit of retaliation will help to explain the presence of so many Irish deserters in Canada in the eighteenth century. They were so numerous, in fact, that they became a menace to British military efficiency in .\merica. It was to the desertions of "Irish papists" that Sir William John- son, .\gent General of Indian affairs, attributed the uneasiness existing among the Mohawks and other more westerly tribes who had remained loyal to the British. In a letter to the Lords of Trade, in London (28 May, 1756), he asked to he empowered to reward any Indians who would deliver up Irish soldiers who were living amongst them. Letters exist in the .\rchives of the Marine, in Paris, giving Irish soldiers permission to remain in Canada, or to return to France, where they might join their countrymen in the Clare Regiment. Many of them, liowever. preferred to remain and settle in New France, where they would be safe from the law enforced liy liritain, after the vic- tory of Fontenoy, which stipul.ltod tliat " Irish officers and soldiers who had been in the service of France . . . should l)e disabled from liolding any real or personal property, and the real or personal property should be- long to the first Protestant discoverer".
The presence of a battaUon of the Irish Brigade in
Canada between 1755 and 1760 has always been a
moot topic. In his " Documentary History" O'Cal-
laghan gives a letter of Doreil, the French Commissary
General, to Count d'Argenson, Minister of War, where-
in he sa^-s that, "agreeably to the wish of the Marquis
de Vaudreuil, Governor of New France, several bat-
talions of reinforcements should be sent to Canada
and among them one Irish battalion", the reason given
being that the Irish could be recruited from their
fellow-countrymen already in Canada, or from de-
.serters from the enemy. O'FarrclI asserts that this
battalion landed in Quebec on 26 June, 1755; but this
is e\ndently an erroneous statement, for Doreil's
appointment as Commissary General was dated only
two months prior to the departure of the fleet, which
he and de Vaudreuil accompanied to Canada. Three
years later a "battalion of foreign volunteers" —
possibly the Irish battalion suggested by Doreil —
landed at Louisburg, where they met officers in the
French service with such names as Admiral Mac-
namara. Captain McCarty, M. de Hagerty, and others,
who were then operating on Isle Royale. If, however,
Irish soldiers were incorporated in the B^arn Regi-
ment, as O'Callaghan supposes, they saw active ser-
vice on four historic occasions: (1) on 8 September,
1755, under the leadership of the impetuous Dieskau,
when the battalion suffered defeat in the attack on
Fort Edward, but when Sir William Johnson, com-
manding three thousand men, did not dare follow up
his victory; (2) in the capture of Fort Oswego from
the English, August, 175G, by General de Montcalm,
where, according to Hutenac, a French deserter to
the English side, the "red faced with green" was
conspicuous enough for special mention ; (3) in August,
1757, at the surrender of Fort A\'illiam Henry, on
Lake George, when de Levis defeated Munroe; (4) in
the brilliant defeat of the British, 8 July, 1758, at Ti-
conderoga, on Lake Champlain, in the important en-
gagement kno'mi as the liattle of Carillon. In this
encounter the French troops, of whom the Beam
Regiment formed a part, attacked Abererorabie's
army of sixteen thousand, repelled seven successive
charges, and killed or wounded four thousand of the
enemy with a loss to themselves of only thirty officers
and three hundred and forty men. No documents,
however, have come to light so far to prove the pres-
ence of an autonomous Irish corps in this campaign.
The correspondence of de \'audreuil shows that he did
not take kindly to the emplo^'ment of Irish prisoners
taken from the English; he even sent a whole com-
pany back to France in 1757 to be incorporated in one
of the brigades there. But there were certainly Irish
soldiers to be found in the French ranks fighting
against the historic enemy; the names of several Irish
officers wounded at Carillon, such as McCarthy, Floyd,
Carlan. etc., were sent by Montcalm to the governor
after the victory had been gained. Carillon recalls
the Celtic heroism displayed at Fontenoy, and this
fact, together with the suggestion contained in the
letter of the commissary general, has led chroniclers
to siu-mise the presence at Carillon of a battalion of the
famous Irish Brigade.
.\t the close of the war, many disbanded soldiers returned to Europe, while the rest settled in Canada. "The remainder of the troops", writes de Levis, "having formed connexions in the colony, resolved to remain there." Their long years of service among the French had made the Irish fanuliar with the lan- guage and customs of this jieople, and the gallicizing of their names, as we find them in the parish registers of the Province of QuoIh'c, shielded the bearers from British retaliation. That retaliation was evidently intended is shown by the jiersistency with which General Jeffi-ey .\mherst, in 17li0. refused to grant the article of the capitulation dealing with the sulijccts of the King of England taken prisoners wliile in arms
