James Orr's first volume of verse did not appear until 1804, by which time he had returned from his brief period of enforced exile in America. Following the Rising, and for a period during the late autumn of 1798 or spring of 1799, he fled, probably to the neighbourhood of Philadelphia, as according to McDowell he did not believe himself ‘safe in his own country’. While Orr left virtually nothing as a record of his brief period in enforced exile, the experience was clearly deeply significant and traumatic for him. We must now consider what may be gleaned, or at least inferred, about that experience. What were the effects of the ‘sea-change’ he suffered? How does he emerge from it as a poet and a patriot?

James ‘Balloon’ Tytler, an exiled Scots radical, travelled to Philadelphia in 1795, after a period in Belfast. During his voyage he composed an ode in praise of America where, he writes, ‘Fair Liberty her Course began’(l. 84). The United Irish leader Wolfe Tone spent a period in Philadelphia in 1795 before going on to France but was far less complimentary. He describes the people of Philadelphia as ‘a disgusting race, eaten up with all the vice of commerce and the vilest of all pride, the pride of the purse’. About fellow Irishmen who had migrated to Pennsylvania he says: ‘If you meet a confirmed blackguard, you may be sure he is Irish’.