Series 1 - William Hill letter transcripts

50pp

Per Kerby A. Miller: 'The William Hill manuscript letters, and other family documents, are in the possession of Dr. William G. Hill of Abbeville, South Carolina, who kindly provided photocopies to [Kerby Miller] and permission to publish. Photocopies of at least some of the letters are also located in the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast, where they are catalogued as T1820.'

[These letters contain outdated attitudes or language that does not reflect the current views or positions of the University of Galway Library. Reader discretion is advised.]
Typed transcripts of 11 letters, dated 1847-1883, most of them written by William Hill, a cotton planter and merchant in Abbeville, South Carolina, to his brother, David Hill, in Ballynure town and parish, County Antrim. Hill, who emigrated to South Carolina in 1822, had United Irish antecedents and strong Irish republican, anti-monarchical, and anti-British political opinions, which in his mind, at least, did not contradict his commitment to Southern slavery and racial hierarchy.
Per Miller, ‘The William Hill letters illuminate:

1. Early 19th-century emigration of Ulster Presbyterians who, despite landlord and growing Orange Order hegemony, retained Irish republican and anti-British political attitudes, inherited from the United Irishmen of the 1790s.
2. Nineteenth-century Ulster Presbyterian emigration to the Old South, continuing a migration pattern prominent since the 1760s-70s.
3. Ulster Presbyterian (and other Irish) settlers in South Carolina.
4. Irish immigrant cotton planters in South Carolina and the Old South, generally.
5. Irish immigrants in the Old South: their experiences with, and attitudes toward, slavery, Southern secession, the Civil War, Southern defeat and slave emancipation, and post-war Reconstruction.
6. Irish Protestant immigrants' attitudes to Irish Catholic immigrants (especially Famine immigrants).
7. The Know-Nothing movement and anti-Irish prejudice-even anti-Irish Protestant prejudice.
8. Acute homesickness and nostalgia for Ireland among Irish [Protestant] immigrants.'

Of the 11 letters, five are referenced to this series. The remaining six are referenced to versions of located in P155/24/1/1.
The complete set of materials pertaining to the William Hill letters, including Kerby A. Miller’s complied research and essays on Irish emigrants in the Old South of the United States, complete transcripts and photocopies of the Hill letters, and Miller’s research on Hill, are located in P155/24/1.