With St. Patrick’s Day upcoming, Dr. Richard Bell shares the contributions of the Irish in the American Revolution. Giving testimony to the British Parliament in 1779, Joseph Galloway estimated that Irishmen composed perhaps one-half of the Continental Army. Five years later, after Washington’s army won the war, another expert witness told Parliament that “the Irish language was as commonly spoken in the American ranks as English” and that Irish valor “determined the contest.” While exaggerated, those claims contained an essential truth: that men of Irish heritage played crucial roles in...