The Invisible Irish – Reviewed by The Scotsman

The Invisible Irish, Finding Protestants in the Nineteenth-Century Migrations to America, by Rankin Sherling, was reviewed this past weekend by Scotland’s national newspaper, The Scotsman.

The review, which was written by author and professor Dean Jobb, discusses the link between the clergy and the mass Irish Protestant migration in the 19th century. The following is an excerpt from the review:

It’s one of the loose ends of Scots-Irish history: how many Irish Protestants emigrated to the United States in the 19th century, and where did they settle? There’s no simple answer, because the records that could establish the scope of this mass migration – tens of thousands of people over the course of the century – simply do not exist. Britain and the US did not begin to keep detailed migration records until the mid-1800s and the US census did not record religious affiliation.

“The one single historical databank that could possibly reveal the parameters of Irish Protestant immigration in the 19th-century United States cannot do so,” historian Rankin Sherling notes, “because the right questions were not asked.”

As a result, Irish Protestants – most descendants of 17th-century Plantation Scots Presbyterians – have become the “invisible Irish” of the title, lost in the exodus of Irish Catholics to America in the 1800s, particularly during the Great Famine. Sherling, a professor of history at Marion Military Institute in Alabama, came up with an ingenious approach to solve this puzzle: follow the clerics. Read the full review on The Scotsman >

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