This John Sullivan was surely one of the grandest characters in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, and the record of his descendants serves as an all-sufficient reply to the anti-Irish prejudices of some American historians.  He was the father of a governor of New Hampshire and of a governor of Massachusetts; of an attorney-general of New Hampshire and of an attorney-general of Massachusetts; of New Hampshire’s only major-general in the Continental army; of the first judge appointed by Washington in New Hampshire; and of four sons who were officers in the Continental army.  He was grandfather of an attorney-general of New Hampshire, of a governor of Maine, and of a United States Senator from New Hampshire.  He was great-grandfather of an attorney-general of New Hampshire, and great-great-grandfather of an officer in the Thirteenth New Hampshire regiment in the Civil War.

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In Rhode Island, Irish people are on record as far back as 1640, and for many years after that date they continued to come.  Edward Larkin was an esteemed citizen of Newport in 1655.  Charles McCarthy was one of the founders of the town of East Greenwich in 1677, while in this vicinity as early as 1680 are found such names as Casey, Higgins, Magennis, Kelley, Murphy, Reylie, Maloney, Healy, Delaney, Walsh, and others of Irish origin.  On the rosters of the Colonial militia who fought in King Philip’s war (1675) are found the names of 110 soldiers of Irish birth or descent, some of whom, for their services at the battle of Narragansett, received grants of land in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.  The New England Historical and Genealogical Register for 1848 contains some remarkable testimony of the sympathy of the people of Ireland for the sufferers in this cruel war, and the “Irish Donation,” sent out from Dublin in the year 1676, will always stand in history to Ireland’s credit and as an instance of her intimate familiarity with American affairs, one hundred years prior to that Revolution which emancipated the people of this land from the same tyranny under which she herself has groaned.  And yet, what a cruel travesty on history it reads like now, when we scan the official records of the New England colonies and find that the Irish were often called “convicts”, and it was thought that measures should be taken to prevent their landing on the soil where they and their sons afterwards shed their blood in the cause of their fellow colonists!  In the minutes of the provincial Assemblies and in the reports rendered to the General Court, as well as in other official documents of the period, are found expressions of the sentiment which prevailed against the natives of the “Island of Sorrows.”  Only twenty years before the outbreak of King Philip’s war, the government of England was asked to provide a law “to prevent the importation of Irish Papists and convicts that are yearly pow’rd upon us and to make provision against the growth of this pernicious