As Irish exiles came to the United States in the 1790s, they hoped for acceptance and participation within the American political process. What they experienced, however, was rejection and conflict. By using John Daly Burk as an exemplar of this rejection and conflict, this paper tracks the rise of Irish-American identity in the Early American Republic. Using an Andersonian lens of nationalism, it proposes that the conditions in the 1790s produced both discrete and overt historical events that allowed, by the early 1800s, an abstraction of Ireland from geographical space into an idea that was modular. In doing this, Irish and Irish-Americans adopted an exile motif as an essential element of their identity within the United States. Looking at three different Irish editors in America between the years of 1807-1820, this paper demonstrates the nascent roots of this abstraction of Ireland, showing the transformation it had on the Irish-American community in the United State.