On August 19th 1777, John Adams (later to succeed George Washington as president) reported gleefully to his wife Abigail on developments in the war on the northern frontier: “The Family of Johnson, the black part of it as well as the white, are pretty well thinned. Rascals! they deserve Extermination.” To understand the most important – and most neglected – Irish dimension of the American Revolution we need to ask: who was this biracial family and why did the Founding Fathers want to exterminate them?

The place to start is with the Declaration of Independence itself. One of its justifications for throwing off allegiance to the British monarch is that “He ... has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

The leaders of those “Indian savages” were an extended Mohawk-Irish kinship group – what Adams called “The Family of Johnson”. To remember why they had taken up arms on the side of the British against the revolutionaries is to remember what so many want to forget: that this was a fight over land that belonged to neither the Americans nor the British.

The “Family of Johnson” was founded by a man about whom I once wrote a book called White Savage. The family name was originally MacShane (claiming descent from the rebel Shane O’Neill), anglicised as John’s son – Johnson. The Johnsons, based near Dunshaughlin in County Meath, were Catholic Jacobites who lost their lands after the triumph of William of Orange.

All aboard the golf........

© The Irish Times