Monday, July 03, 2017

"If defeated everywhere else..." that Washington quote, 1890

I have found it, in the speech given by Mayor Henry Irvin Gourley at the opening session of the Second Congress of the Scotch-Irish Society which was held at Pittsburg in May 1890, given as:

“If defeated everywhere else, I will make my last stand for liberty among the Scotch-Irish of Virginia”. 

But no primary source cited. This then predates the William McKinley paraphrase of 1893. Gourley was born in 1838, ‘to a peasant family’ at Thompsontown in Juniata County in mid-Pennsylvania. His father was Joseph Gourley, but he died when Henry was just five years old, leaving his widow to raise the family. A full biography is online here.

In the 1700s there was a Fermanagh township in Juniata County, and by the 1776 revolution around 1/3 of the population of the whole state was Scotch-Irish.

• My previous post about the 1890 Pittsburg Congress is here. Gourley is shown below.

Henry I Gourley

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