The Irish Man Who Named the United States

Céad Míle Fáilte, and you are very welcome to this week’s Letter from Ireland. The first cut of hay is being saved in the fields around us here in County Cork, the evenings have stretched themselves both long and golden, and the roadsides are just starting to blaze with fuchsia and montbretia in that way they have every July. I have a cup of Lyons’ tea beside me as I write, and I hope you will pour yourself whatever you fancy and settle in with me for a while. How are things in your part of the world today?

It is a special weekend for many of you. Yesterday, the 4th of July, our friends and members across the water marked 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was adopted in Philadelphia, a quarter of a millennium since a new nation first announced itself to the world. So, this morning I want to share the story of an Irish man who sits, almost forgotten, right at the heart of that story. His name was Stephen Moylan, and he is credited with the earliest surviving written use of four words that half the world now says without a second thought: the United States of America.

A Boy from Blarney Street.

Stephen Moylan was born in Cork in the 1730s, on Blarney Street, which was in those days part of the great butter road into the city, a long road that saw farmers carry their butter from the farms of Cork, Kerry and Limerick towards the market at Shandon. This was where butter was weighed and graded and sent off to feed ships and markets far beyond Ireland. The old “shambles” (what we call an abattoir today) stood there too, adding its own noise and definite smell to the life of the district. It was a place of trade and traffic, of carts and barrels and shouted bargains, the commercial heart of the city. Into a prosperous merchant family in the middle of all this was born a young man called Stephen Moylan.

Being a prosperous family, though, did not mean untroubled. The Moylans were Catholic, and as this was the Ireland of the penal laws, when Catholic education at home was denied by law and so opportunity had to be found elsewhere.

Sent Across the Water.

Like many a well-off Catholic family of the time, the Moylans sent their boy abroad. Stephen was educated on the continent of Europe, well beyond the reach of the restrictions at home, and he grew into exactly the kind of young man those years produced, worldly, well connected and fluent in the ways of international trade. He made his way starting out as a merchant in Lisbon, learning the shipping routes that connected the ports of Europe together, before eventually crossing the Atlantic and settling in Philadelphia in 1768.

He did well there and became the first president of the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick, a gathering of Irish merchants and patriots. When the quarrel between the colonies and the British Crown descended into war, Stephen Moylan threw himself in on the side of the American cause and, before long he was serving directly under George Washington himself.

Four Words That Named a Nation.

On the 2nd of January, 1776, from the army’s headquarters at Cambridge, Massachusetts, Moylan sat down to write to a friend and fellow officer, Colonel Joseph Reed. He had a notion that the colonies needed a proper emissary sent to Spain to seek help for the cause, and he rather fancied the job himself, given all he knew of European trade. In the middle of laying out his argument, he wrote a single sentence that would outlive everything else he ever did, saying that he should like vastly to go “with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain.”

He did not write “the united colonies,” which was the common phrase of the day, but the United States of America. It is, as far as anyone has yet found, the earliest surviving written use of the name, set down by a Irish hand six months before the Declaration was adopted. The letter remained unnoticed for well over two centuries until a researcher brought it to light more than a decade ago, and it changed the answer to a question Americans had been asking themselves for a very long time: who first named the country? The answer, it turns out, was a merchant’s son from the butter road – at least the first surviving mention on paper. I’ll take that!

When the War Came Home to Cork.

There is one last twist to the tale, and it is the kind of thing that makes you realise how the world was interconnected, even back in those days. Cork city of the time was one of the great provisioning ports of the world, its quaysides holding beef, butter and other goods bound for ships and markets far beyond Ireland. But the very war that Stephen Moylan had crossed an ocean to fight brought disruption back across the Atlantic, for British restrictions and wartime upheaval fell hard on Irish trade, and Cork merchants felt it sharply. The city lived by its exports, and when those routes were choked or disturbed, families like the Moylans, and the whole commercial world from which they had come, would have felt it strongly.

There is something very Irish in that, I think, the story of just one family connected to the biggest events of the age, gaining and losing by turns, never quite in the history books and never quite out of them.

So this weekend, as our American friends and members raise a glass to 250 years, we raise one back to you from here in Ireland, and we wish you a wonderful celebration.

And it leaves me with a question.

Where were your own Irish ancestors in 1776? Whether you come from the USA or not, we’d love to hear the answer.

Were they still at home in Ireland, working a bit of land, keeping a shop, labouring on an estate, fishing from a small harbour, or going to Mass in a country still shadowed by the penal laws? Had they already taken a ship, like Stephen Moylan before them? Or were they still waiting, unknowingly, for the generations ahead who would one day scatter across the world?

That’s it for this week.

Slán for now,

Mike.