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| Scotch-Irish American |
|---|
      |
| Robert Redford · Andrew Jackson · John McCain Bill Clinton · Ulysses S. Grant · Davy Crockett |
| Total population |
|
Scotch-Irish |
| Regions with significant populations |
| Southern United States, Western United States, Appalachia |
| Languages |
| American English, especially Southern Appalachian and South Midland or Highland Southern dialects of Southern American English |
| Religion |
| Predominantly Protestant (Dissenter), Presbyterian, Baptist |
| Related ethnic groups |
| British Americans (Scottish Americans, English Americans, Welsh Americans), Irish Americans Ulster Scots, Irish, Scottish, English |
Scotch-Irish (the historically common term in North America) or Scots-Irish refers to inhabitants of the United States and, by some, of Canada who are of Ulster Scottish descent. The term may be qualified with American (or Canadian) as in "Scotch-Irish American" or "American of Scots-Irish ancestry".
The term "Scotch-Irish" is an Americanism, almost unknown in the Republic of Ireland or the United Kingdom, and refers to Irish Protestant immigrants to America during the 1700s. Between 250,000 and 400,000 Scots-Irish migrated to America in the 18th century.[2] The majority of these immigrants were descended from Scottish and English families who had been transplanted to Ireland during the Plantation of Ulster in the 1600s.[3] The term "Scotch-Irish" has led to confusion even among descendants of the Scotch-Irish themselves: some taking it to mean a mixture of Scottish and Irish ethnicities, and others thinking it refers to Irish immigrants to Scotland. The term is also misleading because some of the Scotch-Irish had little or no Scottish ancestry at all, as Protestant families had also been transplanted to Ulster from northern England, Wales and the London area, and some from Flanders, the German Palatinate, and France (such as the French Huguenot ancestors of Davy Crockett). However, the large Scottish element in the Plantation of Ulster gave the Ulster Protestant settlements a Scottish character, and when the Ulster immigrants began to arrive in America they were collectively given the name "Scotch-Irish".[4]
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 4.3 million Americans claim Scotch-Irish ancestry. The actual number may be somewhat higher, as some people who claim "American" as their ancestry could be of Scots-Irish origin.[weasel words] Census maps of ancestry show that claims of "American" ancestry are highest in the regions originally settled by the Scotch-Irish.[5][original research?]
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Because of the close proximity of the islands of Britain and Ireland, migrations in both directions had been occurring since Ireland was first settled after the retreat of the ice sheets. Gaels from Ireland colonised current South-West Scotland as part of the Kingdom of Dál Riata, eventually replacing the native Pictish culture throughout Scotland. These Gaels had previously been named Scoti by the Romans, and eventually the name was applied to the entire Kingdom of Scotland. The Scottish crown eventually became unified with the Kingdom of England, forming the Kingdom of Great Britain. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see History of Scotland), beginning about 1615, a systematic plantation of mostly Lowland Scots settlers to Ireland was undertaken. Many settlers were hardscrabble, subsistence farmers barely able to support their families. In the early years of the Plantation, the majority of the settlers were Lowland and Border Scots seeking a better life. The Plantation was seen as a way to eliminate the problem of the Border Reivers, raiders and cattle-thieves who were causing instability along the Scottish-English frontier, and who were a potential problem for James VI of Scotland, who had recently also become King of England. Transporting reiver families to Ireland would bring peace to the Anglo-Scot border country, and also provide fighting men who could suppress the native Irish. Many of the early settlers came from the border areas of both England and Scotland.
The first major influx of Scots into Ulster came during the settlement of east Down onto land cleared of native Irish. This started in May 1606 and was followed in 1610 by the arrival of many more Scots as part of the Plantation of Ulster. The Scottish population in Ulster was further augmented during the subsequent Irish Confederate Wars. The first of the Stuart Kingdoms to collapse into civil war was Ireland, where, prompted in part by the anti-Catholic rhetoric of the Covenanters, Irish Catholics launched a rebellion in October. In reaction to the proposal by Charles I and Thomas Wentworth to raise an army manned by Irish Catholics to put down the Covenanter movement in Scotland, the Parliament of Scotland had threatened to invade Ireland in order to achieve "the extirpation of Popery out of Ireland" (according to the interpretation of Richard Bellings, a leading Irish politician of the time). The fear this caused in Ireland unleashed a wave of massacres against Protestant English and Scottish settlers once the rebellion had broken out. All sides displayed extreme cruelty in this phase of the war. Around 4000 settlers were massacred and a further 12,000 may have died of privation after being driven from their homes.[6][7] In one notorious incident, the Protestant inhabitants of Portadown were taken captive and then massacred on the bridge in the town.[8] The settlers responded in kind, as did the British-controlled government in Dublin, with attacks on the Irish civilian population. Massacres of native civilians occurred at Rathlin Island and elsewhere.[9] In early 1642, the Covenanters sent an army to Ulster to defend the Scottish settlers there from the Irish rebels who had attacked them after the outbreak of the rebellion. The original intention of the Scottish army was to re-conquer Ireland, but due to logistical and supply problems, it was never in a position to advance far beyond its base in eastern Ulster. The Covenanter force remained in Ireland until the end of the civil wars but was confined to its garrison around Carrickfergus after its defeat by the native Ulster Army at the Battle of Benburb in 1646. After the war was over, many of the soldiers settled permanently in Ulster. Another major influx of Scots into northern Ireland occurred in the 1690s, when tens of thousands of people fled a famine in Scotland to come to Ulster.
During the course of the 17th century, the number of settlers belonging to Calvinist dissenting sects, including Scottish and Northumbrian Presbyterians, English Baptists, French and Flemish Huguenots, and German Palatines, became the majority in the province of Ulster. However, the Presbyterians and other dissenters, along with Catholics, were not members of the established church and were legally disadvantaged by the Penal Laws, which gave full rights only to members of the Church of England/Church of Ireland, who were often absentee landlords and the descendants of English title-holding settlers. For this reason, up until the 19th century, and despite their common fear of the dispossessed Catholic native Irish, there was considerable disharmony between the Presbyterians and the Protestant Ascendancy in Ulster. As a result of this many Ulster-Scots, along with Catholic native Irish, ignored religious differences to join the United Irishmen and participate in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, in support of egalitarian and republican goals.
Just a few generations after arriving in Ulster, considerable numbers of Ulster-Scots emigrated to the North American colonies of Great Britain throughout the 18th century (between 1717 and 1770 alone, 250,000 settled in what would become the United States). According to Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1988), Protestants were one-third the population of Ireland, but three-quarters of all emigrants leaving from 1700 to 1776; 70% of these Protestants were Presbyterians. Other factors contributing to the mass exodus of Ulster Scots to America during the 18th century were a series of droughts and rising rents imposed by often absentee English and/or Anglo-Irish landlords.
Roughly a quarter of a million Ulster Scots migrated to the Americas between 1717 and 1776. As a late arriving group, they found that land in the coastal areas of the English colonies was either already owned or too expensive, so they quickly left for the hill country where land could be had cheaply. Here they lived on the frontiers of America. Early frontier life was extremely challenging, but poverty and hardship were familiar to them. The term "hillbilly" has often been applied disparagingly to their descendants in the mountains, carrying connotations of poverty, backwardness and violence; this word probably having its origins in Scotland and Ireland.
The first trickle of Scotch-Irish settlers arrived in New England. Valued for their fighting prowess as well as their Protestant dogma, they were invited by Cotton Mather and other leaders to come over to help settle and secure the frontier. In this capacity, many of the first permanent settlements in Maine and New Hampshire, especially after 1718, were Scotch-Irish and many place names as well as the character of Northern New Englanders reflect this fact. The Scotch-Irish brought the potato with them from Ireland, in Maine where it became a staple crop as well as an economic base.[10]
From 1717 to the next thirty or so years, the primary points of entry for the Ulster immigrants were Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New Castle, Delaware. The Scotch-Irish radiated westward across the Alleghenies, as well as into Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.[11] The early immigrants settled heavily in Chester and Lancaster Counties in Pennsylvania, but as these areas became populated later immigrants continued west into the Alleghenies and beyond to the Pittsburgh area, while the majority turned south as land was opened for settlement in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. These immigrants followed the Great Wagon Road from Lancaster, through Gettysburg, and down through Staunton, Virginia, to Big Lick (now Roanoke), Virginia. Here the pathway split, with the Wilderness Road taking settlers west into Tennessee and Kentucky, while the main road continued south into the Carolinas.[12]
The Scotch-Irish soon became the dominant culture of the Appalachians from Pennsylvania to Georgia. (See Tuckahoe-Cohee). Author (and U.S. Senator) Jim Webb puts forth a thesis in his book Born Fighting to suggest that the character traits he ascribes to the Scotch-Irish such as loyalty to kin, extreme mistrust of governmental authority and legal strictures, and a propensity to bear arms and to use them, helped shape the American identity. [13]
The alleged anti-English sentiment among those Ulster-Scots who emigrated to the Thirteen Colonies may have encouraged some to join the patriotic cause during the American Revolution (Matthew Thornton, George Taylor, and James Smith were all signers of the United States Declaration of Independence), though many in the Carolinas were loyalists. Some historians[who?][citation needed] suggest that their experience in Ulster as a colonial minority surrounded by a resistant, indigenous, population prepared them for life on America's frontier in conflict with the American Indians.
In the 1790s, the new American government assumed the debts the individual states had amassed during the American Revolutionary War, and the Congress placed a tax on whiskey (among other things) to help repay those debts. Large producers were assessed a tax of six cents a gallon. Smaller producers, many of whom were Scottish (often Ulster-Scots) descent and located in the more remote areas, were taxed at a higher rate of nine cents a gallon. These rural settlers were short of cash to begin with, and lacked any practical means to get their grain to market, other than fermenting and distilling it into relatively portable spirits. From Pennsylvania to Georgia, the western counties engaged in a campaign of harassment of the federal tax collectors. "Whiskey Boys" also conducted violent protests in Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. This civil disobedience eventually culminated in armed conflict in the Whiskey Rebellion. President George Washington marched at the head of 13,000 soldiers to suppress the insurrection.
According to James Leyburn's The Scotch Irish: A Social History (1962), the Scotch-Irish at first usually referred to themselves simply as Irish, without the qualifier "Scotch" or "Scots", and were called Irish by others. It was not until the mass immigration of Irish in the 1840s caused by the Great Irish Famine (most of whom were Catholic, indigenous, Irish) that the earlier Irish Americans began to call themselves Scotch-Irish to distinguish themselves from these new arrivals. This newer wave of Irish often worked as laborers (and to a lesser extent, tradesmen), typically settling at first in the coastal urban centers to facilitate work, though many would migrate to the interior to labor on large-scale 19th century infrastructure projects such as the canals and, later, railroads. Thus, the Catholic Irish of Boston, New York City, etc., who descended from the 1840s wave, did not often mingle in early years with the Scotch-Irish, who by contrast had in large numbers become well-established years earlier in the rural American interior as small-scale farmers, especially the hill country of the Appalachians and Ozarks.
| Year | Population [14][15][16] |
|---|---|
| 1625 | 1,980 |
| 1641 | 50,000 |
| 1688 | 200,000 |
| 1700 | 250,900 |
| 1702 | 270,000 |
| 1715 | 434,600 |
| 1749 | 1,046,000 |
| 1754 | 1,485,634 |
| 1765 | 2,240,000 |
| 1775 | 2,418,000 |
| 1780 | 2,780,400 |
| 1790 | 3,929,326 |
| 1800 | 5,308,483 |
According to The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy, by Kory L. Meyerink and Loretto Dennis Szucs, the following were the countries of origin for new arrivals coming to the United States before 1790. The regions marked * were part of Great Britain. The ancestry of the 3,929,326 million population in 1790 has been estimated by various sources by sampling last names in the 1790 census and assigning them a country of origin. The Irish in the 1790 census were mostly Scotch-Irish. The French were mostly Huguenots. The total U.S. Catholic population in 1790 was probably less than 5%. The Indian population inside territorial U.S. 1790 boundaries was less than 100,000.
| U.S. Historical Populations | ||
|---|---|---|
| Country | Immigrants Before 1790 | Population 1790-1 |
|
|
||
| England* | 230,000 | 2,100,000 |
| Ireland* | 142,000 | 300,000 |
| Scotland* | 48,500 | 150,000 |
| Wales* | 4,000 | 10,000 |
| Other -5 | 50,000 | 200,000 |
|
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||
| Total | 950,000 | 3,929,326 |
After the creation of British North America in 1763, Protestant Irish, both Irish Anglicans and Ulster-Scottish Presbyterians, migrated over the decades to Upper Canada, some as United Empire Loyalists or directly from Ulster.
The first significant number of Canadian settlers to arrive from Ireland were Protestants from predominantly Ulster and largely of Scottish descent who settled in the mainly central Nova Scotia in the 1760s. Many came through the efforts of colonizer Alexander McNutt. Some came directly from Ulster whilst others arrived after via New England.
Ulster-Scottish migration to Western Canada has two distinct components, those who came via eastern Canada or the US, and those who came directly from Ireland. Many who came West from were fairly well assimilated, in that they spoke English and understood British customs and law, and tended to be regarded as just a part of English Canada. However, this picture was complicated by the religious division. Many of the original "English" Canadian settlers in the Red River Colony were fervent Irish loyalist Protestants, and members of the Orange Order.
In 1806, The Benevolent Irish Society (BIS) was founded as a philanthropic organization in St. John's, Newfoundland. Membership was open to adult residents of Newfoundland who were of Irish birth or ancestry, regardless of religious persuasion. The BIS was founded as a charitable, fraternal, middle-class social organization, on the principles of "benevolence and philanthropy", and had as its original objective to provide the necessary skills which would enable the poor to better themselves. Today the society is still active in Newfoundland and is the oldest philanthropic organization in North America.[citation needed]
In 1877, a breakthrough in Irish Canadian Protestant-Catholic relations occurred in London, Ontario. This was the founding of the Irish Benevolent Society, a brotherhood of Irishmen and women of both Catholic and Protestant faiths. The society promoted Irish Canadian culture, but it was forbidden for members to speak of Irish politics when meeting. This companionship of Irish people of all faiths quickly tore down the walls of sectarianism in Ontario. Today, the Society is still operating.
For years, Prince Edward Island had been divided between Catholics and Protestants. In the latter half of the twentieth century, this sectarianism diminished and was ultimately destroyed recently after two events occurred. Firstly, the Catholic and Protestant school boards were merged into one secular institution, and secondly, the practice of electing two MLAs for each provincial riding (one Catholic and one Protestant) was ended.
The usage "Scots-Irish" is relatively recent and regarded by some as an incorrect though well-intended effort to accommodate Scottish preferences. The term has usually been Scotch-Irish in America, as evident in Merriam-Webster dictionaries, where the term Scotch-Irish is recorded from 1744, while Scots-Irish is not recorded until 1972.[17] While modern Scots generally prefer the term "Scots" to "Scotch," in such situations as "Scotch whisky," "Scotch-Irish", "Scotch Baptist," "Scotch egg," and others, the term "Scotch" is preferred. Also, there are many place names in the United States with the latter spelling, such as Scotch Plains, NJ, and several others, yet there are relatively few place names where the first word is Scots.
In the seminal Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history) historian David Hackett Fischer asserts:
Some historians describe these immigrants as "Ulster Irish" or "Northern Irish." It is true that many sailed from the province of Ulster... part of much larger flow which drew from the lowlands of Scotland, the north of England, and every side of the Irish Sea. Many scholars call these people "Scotch-Irish." That expression is an Americanism, rarely used in Britain and much resented by the people to whom it was attached.
Fischer prefers to speak of "borderers" (referring to the historically war-torn England-Scotland border) as the population ancestral to the "backcountry" "cultural stream" (one of the four major and persistent cultural streams he identifies in American history) and notes the borderers were not purely Celtic but also had substantial Anglo-Saxon and Viking or Scandinavian roots, and were quite different from Celtic-speaking groups like the Scottish Highlanders or Irish (that is, Gaelic-speaking and Roman Catholic).
An example of the use of the term is found in A History of Ulster: "Ulster Presbyterians – known as the 'Scotch Irish' – were already accustomed to being on the move, and clearing and defending their land."[18]
Other terms used to describe the descendants of Protestants from the border country of England and Scotland that first migrated to Ulster and later re-migrated to North America include "Northern Irish" or "Irish Presbyterians."
In America, the historic name for these people is "Scotch-Irish", and depending on the label used, can draw ire from one or more party. However, as one scholar observed, "...in this country [USA], where they have been called Scotch-Irish for over two hundred years, it would be absurd to give them a name by which they are not known here... Here their name is Scotch-Irish; let us call them by it." [19]
Leyburn cites several early American uses of the term.[20]
The Oxford English Dictionary says the first use of the term "Scotch-Irish" came in Pennsylvania in 1744. Its citations are:
A false myth claims that Queen Elizabeth used the term. Another myth is that Shakespeare used the spelling 'Scotch' as a proper noun, but his only use of the word in any of his writings is as a verb, as in scotching a snake, being scotched, etc.
It was also used to differentiate from either the Anglo-Irish, Irish Catholics, or immigrants who came directly from Scotland.
The word "Scotch" was the favoured adjective as a designation — it literally means "... of Scotland". People in Scotland refer to themselves as Scots, or adjectivally/collectively as Scots rather than Scotch or as being Scottish.
Finding the coast already heavily settled, most groups of settlers from the north of Ireland moved into the "western mountains", where they populated the Appalachian regions and the Ohio Valley. Others settled in northern New England, The Carolinas, Georgia and north-central Nova Scotia.
In the United States Census, 2000, 4.3 million Americans (1.5% of the U.S. population) claimed Scotch-Irish ancestry, though author James Webb suggests estimates that the true number of Scotch-Irish in the U.S. is more in the region of 27 million. [1] Two possible reasons have been suggested[who?] for the disparity of the figures of the census and the estimation. The first is that Scotch-Irish may quite often regard themselves as simply having either Irish ancestry (which 10.8% of Americans reported) or Scottish ancestry (reported by 4.9 million or 1.7% of the total population). The other is that most of the descendants of this group have integrated themselves, through intermarriage with other ethnicities of similar faiths, into an American society that had long been a rurally dispersed and Protestant majority. Therefore they, like many English Americans or German Americans, do not feel the need to identify with their ancestors as strongly as perhaps the more recent Catholic Irish Americans or Italian Americans, who had not traditionally married outside their faiths and often found partners in dense urban neighborhoods of their own ethnicity.
Interestingly, the areas where the most Americans reported themselves in the 2000 Census only as "American" with no further qualification (e.g. Kentucky, north-central Texas, and many other areas in the Southern US; overall 7% of Americans reported "American") are largely the areas where many Scotch-Irish settled, and are in complementary distribution with the areas which most heavily report Scotch-Irish ancestry, though still at a lower rate than "American" (e.g. western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, western Pennsylvania, northern New England, south-central and far northern Texas, westernmost Florida Panhandle, many rural areas in the Northwest); see Maps of American ancestries. Perhaps a combination of these factors results in the relatively low figures as reported in the census,[original research?] though there does appear[who?] to be an increased interest in the U.S. in recent years in Scotch-Irish ancestry.[citation needed]
Initially the Scotch-Irish immigrants to North America in the eighteenth century were defined by their Presbyterianism.[22] Many of the settlers in the Plantation of Ulster had been from dissenting/non-conformist religious groups which professed a strident Calvinism. These included mainly Lowland Scot Presbyterians, but also English Puritans and Quakers, French Huguenots and German Palatines. These Calvinist groups mingled freely in church matters, and religious belief was more important than nationality, as these groups aligned themselves against both their Catholic Irish and Anglican English neighbors.[23] After their arrival in the New World, the predominantly Presbyterian Scotch-Irish began to move further into the mountainous back-country of Virginia and the Carolinas. The establishment of many settlements in the remote back-country put a strain on the ability of the Presbyterian Church to meet the new demand for qualified, college-educated clergy. Religious groups such as the Baptists and Methodists had no higher education requirement for their clergy to be ordained, and these groups readily provided ministers to meet the demand of the growing Scotch-Irish settlements.[24] By about 1810, Baptist and Methodist churches were in the majority, and the descendants of the Scotch-Irish today remain predominantly Baptist or Methodist.[25]
Many American presidents have ancestral links to Ulster, including three whose parents were born in Ulster. The Irish Protestant vote in the U.S. has not been studied nearly as much as have the Catholic Irish. (On the Catholic vote see Irish Americans). In the 1820s and 1830s, supporters of Andrew Jackson emphasized his Irish background, as did James Knox Polk, but since the 1840s it has been uncommon for a Protestant politician in America to be identified as Irish, but rather as 'Scotch-Irish'. In Canada, by contrast, Irish Protestants remained a cohesive political force well into the twentieth century, identified with the then Conservative Party of Canada and especially with the Orange Institution, although this is less evident in today's politics.[26]
More than one-third of all U.S. Presidents had substantial ancestral origins in the northern province of Ireland (Ulster). President Bill Clinton spoke proudly of that fact, and his own ancestral links with the province, during his two visits to Ulster. Like most US citizens, most US presidents are the result of a "melting pot" of ancestral origins.
Clinton is one of at least seventeen Chief Executives descended from emigrants to the United States from the north of Ireland. While many of the Presidents have typically Ulster-Scots surnames – Jackson, Johnson, McKinley, Wilson – others, such as Roosevelt and Cleveland, have links which are less obvious.
Other occupants of the White House said to have some family ties with Ulster include Presidents John Adams, John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry S. Truman, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush.[27]
The gentle terms of republican race, mixed rabble of Scotch, Irish and foreign vagabonds, descendants of convicts, ungrateful rebels, &c. are some of the sweet flowers of English rhetorick, with which our colonists have of late been regaled. [3] (Benjamin Franklin, 1765)
This cartoon, circulated after the 1763 Conestoga massacre, criticizes the Quakers for their support of Native Americans at the expense of German and Scotch-Irish backcountry settlers. Here, a "broad brim'd" Quaker and Native American each ride as a burden on the backs of "Hibernians." Historical Society of Pennsylvania
The Quakers did not appreciate their interference in politics and were especially unhappy with them when the Scot-Irish gained control of the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1756. Who were the Scot-Irish?
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