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The Irish exodus to the New World came in waves due to various economic and environmental factors. Although Irish inhabitants were present in America beginning with the settlement of Jamestown, the first significant exodus, which brought just 7,000 migrants, occurred from 1718-1729 because of a crop failure in Ireland. A drop in the linen trade brought 50,000 Ulster residents between 1730 and 1754.<ref> Jay P. Dolan, The Irish Americans: A History (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 6-8.</ref> With vast expanses of fertile soil and a lifestyle akin to rural Ireland, America’s southern states were a natural fit for Irish planters. Beginning with the exodus of 1718 until the eve of the Civil War, five generations of Irish farmers sailed to the U.S. and adopted a feeling of ownership in America.
These predominantly Protestant Irishmen of the South were loath to be considered in the same group as the Catholic “Famine Immigrants” of the mid-nineteenth century. In comparison to their counterparts in the North, “southerners of Irish descent, consequently, possessed a larger stake in the American dream.”<ref> Phillip Thomas Tucker, Irish Confederates: The Civil War’s Forgotten Soldiers (Abilene, TX: McWhitney Foundation Press, 2006), 12.</ref>Both during and after Ireland’s Great Famine (1845-1855), immigration to the U.S. soared. The agrarian immigrants were dwarfed in number by urban settlers by 1861. More than one million Irish men, women, and children died of starvation in Ireland while an equal number reached the shores of America by 1854; most of whom crowded into the already bursting tenements of Boston and New York.<ref> Lawrence Frederick Kohl, Introduction to The Irish Brigade and Its Campaigns, by David Conyngham (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), xiii.</ref> By 1860, only 84,000 of the 1.2 million Irish in America resided in the South. <ref> Cal McCarthy, Green, Blue, and Grey: The Irish in the American Civil War (Cork, Ireland: Collins Press, 2009), 12.</ref>
==Civil War Breaks Out==
