Thomas Birch

Thomas Ledlie Birch (1754–1828) was a Presbyterian minister and radical democrat in the Kingdom of Ireland. Forced into American exile following the suppression of the 1798 rebellion, he wrote A Letter from An Irish Emigrant (1799). Assailing the landed Anglican Ascendancy and vindicating the call for an Irish republic, it was the first published apologia for the United Irish insurrection. In the United States, he found himself at odds with the spirit of evangelical revivalism. Early life Birch was the sixth and youngest son of a County Down farmer and merchant. He studied at the University of Glasgow and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in Saintfield in 1776, with 900 families one of the largest Presbyterian congregations in Ireland. He married Isabella Ledlie, a second cousin from Arboe, County Tyrone in 1783. His exposure in Glasgow to the ideas of the Scottish enlightenment heightened the sympathy he shared with his congregants for their American kin in the struggle for independence from Britain. In 1784, through a brother-in-law in Philadelphia, Birch presented George Washington with an address he had written for the (Masonic) Yankee Club of Stewartstown, Tyrone. It expressed their joy that the Americans had succeeded in throwing off “the yoke of slavery” and suggested that their exertions had "shed a benign light on the distressed kingdom of Ireland". Washington returned his thanks.