Today’s color might be green, but history suggests the roots of our outward attire or token green accouterment the roots of the day might as well be red, white and blue.

It was certainly the latter for St. Patrick himself, the 5th century Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland. Historians say depictions of him in blue are more accurate. It wasn’t until the wave of revolutions that washed over the industrialized world in the 18th century’s waning years that green became tied to the Irish’s big day.

The Irish Rebellion of 1798 was not the first strike at British rule by the Irish people, but it might have been the bloodiest. Estimates of casualties in four months of heaviest fighting vary wildly, from 10,000 to 50,000, depending on which researchers you read. But, coming less than a decade after the French revolution and just 20 years after the Britannia lost her 13 colonies to Maj. Gen. Washington, the inspiration for it is clear, regardless of the uprising’s religious undertones with the Catholic Church in the country. The cloud of colonialism was going to be cleared, one way or another.

Patrick, some 1,300 years beforehand, had used the three-leafed shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity. The revolutionaries of 1798 took the nation’s unofficial symbol picked shamrocks and pinned them to their lapels — equivalent to choosing a logo for today’s social media — and it became the buzz-image for the holiday and the nation itself, according to Marion R. Casey, a clinical assistant professor of Irish studies at New York University.

“They took that popular connection of a national saint and the wearing of the green and they applied it politically, and they translated that into garments,” Casey said in an interview on the holiday’s traditions for the History Channel. “So, their uniforms were green.”

After more than a century, accounts of what’s been repackaged as the “United Irishmen Uprising” vary by political and religious perspective. Whether any of my Irish ancestors (paternal paw-paw was dark-haired Irish; he was essentially a can of stout Guinness) took up arms in the bloody summer of 1798 is unknown. My surname, according to personal research of the name itself without any branches of the ol’ family tree, originated across the Irish Sea, in modern-day England.

Whether you’re wearing a lot of green or a little, celebrating in a town where they throw cabbages and other vegetables off Mardi Gras-style floats or just looking forward to this year’s parade in Jackson on Sunday, history helps keep in mind one thing. Behind that emerald is the remnants of a fighting spirit. And behind that influence is a little spirit of ’76.

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Danny Barrett Jr. is a reporter and can be reached by email at danny.barrett@vicksburgpost.com or by phone at 601-636-4545.