On 4 July 1776, fifty-six men signed their names to the document that created the United States of America. Twenty-one of them were of Irish or Scottish birth or descent. Eight were born on the island of Ireland. Eleven had parents or grandparents who came from Scotland. Together, they represent not an incidental footnote to the American founding but a structural part of it — and their story, largely absent from the Irish-American cultural calendar, belongs to July 4th as fully as it belongs to March 17th.
The eight Irish-born signers are:
**Matthew Thornton** was born in County Londonderry around 1714. His family emigrated when he was a child, settling in Worcester, Massachusetts, before he eventually made his life in New Hampshire. He became a physician, served in the colonial militia, and was elected to the Continental Congress too late to attend the formal signing in August 1776 — instead, he signed in November, one of the last to do so. He is buried in Merrimack, New Hampshire. His name is on a plaque that most Irish-Americans have never seen.
**James Smith** was born in County Down around 1719 and emigrated as a young child. He trained as a lawyer in Pennsylvania and became one of the more obscure signers — his papers were largely destroyed in a fire, his correspondence lost. What remains shows a man of fierce conviction, a member of the Committee of Inspection in York who advocated independence well before the Continental Congress came to its decision.
**George Taylor** was born in County Antrim around 1716 and came to Pennsylvania as an indentured servant, eventually becoming an ironmaster in Durham and Bucks County. He served only briefly in the Continental Congress and died in 1781, before the war ended and the country he had signed into being had been fully secured. He is the least remembered of the eight.
**Edward Rutledge** of South Carolina was the youngest signer at 26 years old. His family had emigrated from County Tyrone a generation earlier. A lawyer trained in London, he was initially opposed to independence — he pushed for a delay in the vote of July 1776, believing the colonies were moving too quickly. He came around. He later served as Governor of South Carolina and was the last surviving signer to die, in 1800.
**Thomas Lynch Jr.** of South Carolina was 27 at the time of signing and also of Irish descent. His health was failing during the Congress sessions; he died on a sea voyage in 1779, the ship lost at sea, his body never recovered. He is among the most poignant figures of the founding generation — a young man of obvious gifts who signed his name to a document he would not live to see fulfilled.
**Thomas McKean** was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, to parents who emigrated from County Antrim. He is one of the most consequential of the signers: a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, a president of Delaware, later Governor of Pennsylvania, and Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. His correspondence survives extensively and reveals a man who understood the historical weight of what he was doing.
**Charles Carroll of Carrollton** was the wealthiest man in colonial America, with an estate in Maryland valued at over $500,000 (equivalent to tens of millions today). His great-grandfather had emigrated from County Offaly. Catholic, educated at Jesuit schools in Europe, he was the only Catholic signer — and he added "of Carrollton" to his name on the document specifically to identify himself unambiguously, aware that signing was an act of potential treason. He outlived every other signer, dying in 1832 at 95, the last living connection to the founding act.
**William Whipple** was born in Kittery, Maine, of Irish parents, became a merchant captain, and served in the Continental Congress from New Hampshire. He later commanded troops at the Battle of Saratoga, one of the decisive engagements of the Revolutionary War.
---
What does it mean that eight of the fifty-six signers were born in Ireland?
It means, partly, that the Ireland of the early eighteenth century was a place people left. The penal laws, the land system, the economic restrictions on Catholic and Dissenter alike — these produced a steady emigration of men and women who brought to the colonies a specific relationship to English authority. Many of the Irish emigrants were Scots-Irish Presbyterians from Ulster; some were Catholic; some were Church of Ireland Anglicans. What they shared was a lived experience of colonial governance, of laws written to benefit one group at the expense of another, of an empire that was experienced not from its centre but from its periphery.
That experience was not identical to the experience of enslaved Americans, or of Indigenous peoples, or of those who had no voice in the Congress at all. But it was also not nothing. When the Declaration argues that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, the men who signed it included men whose families had been specifically excluded from equal treatment under English law.
For 33 million Irish-Americans, July 4th is in one sense an ordinary national holiday. In another sense, it is the day their ancestors built a country that they and their descendants would inherit. Matthew Thornton's name is on the document. So is Charles Carroll's. So is Thomas McKean's.
This is a July 4th story. It is also, inescapably, an Irish story.
---
*Alex Monroe is editorial director of Synpro Media, which manages PR and audience development for the Dream In Miles cultural travel newsletter network (170,000 subscribers across Ireland, Scotland, Italy, France, South Africa, London, and New York). Enquiries:
Alex Monroe
Synpro Media
