WHO ARE THE
SCOTCH-IRISH?
The people who would come to be known as the Scotch-Irish or as the Scots-Irish, necessarily had a strong influence on American history, identity, and culture because so there were so many of them permeating the population from colonial times. By the time of the Revolutionary War, immigrants from Ireland's northernmost province of Ulster and their progeny comprised an estimated one-sixth of the European population in the colonies. Another 100,000 came between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
Who were they? Michael Montgomery sums up scholarly consensus: "These people were overwhelmingly Presbyterian, dissenting Protestants opposed to the established Church of Ireland. The great majority of them were of Scottish ancestry and tradition (whose forebears had migrated from Scotland one to four generations earlier following establishment of the Plantation of Ulster under King James I in 1610) and settled in a crescent along the northeastern coast of Ireland." (As Ulster emigration historian Patrick Fitzgerald and others point out, the Ulster immigrants to America also included considerable numbers of native Catholic Irish, along with English, Welsh, Huguenots and other ethnic groups.)
The relationship between these "Ulster-Scots" and the native Irish in Ulster was conflicted and has often been over-simplified. Certainly many of these fervent, often radically anti-Papist Presbyterians perceived a God-given right to settle land wrested from Catholics by the British Crown. And certainly many of the Irish violently rebelled against the English and Scottish interlopers. Yet Ulster's Irish people and the Lowland Scots had a centuries-old history of interaction and cross-cultural ties that mitigated the animosity. Moreover, the Scots in Ireland came to feel as victimized by certain English economic and religious policies as did the native Irish. Economic push-pull factors and religious dissension propelled many Ulster-Scots to across the Atlantic Ocean to the American colonies beginning around 1717.
Though the immigrants arrived at ports from New England to Charleston, the greatest numbers entered in Pennsylvania and spread throughout that colony along with many Palatine Germans. As available farmland dwindled in central Pennsylvania, some Ulster-Scots, Germans and other Europeans ventured westward into the mountains -- eventually making Pittsburgh the first gateway to the West. But many more moved into Virginia's verdant Shenandoah Valley. As decades passed, these immigrants and their children continued southward in successive waves down the Philadelphia Wagon Road. By 1776 they had settled heavily through the Carolinas and as far south as Augusta, Georgia. The further south and further into the 18th century the frontiers were populated by Europeans, the more dominant Ulster people were among those populations.
By the late 1700's American colonists from Ulster perceived that British oppression had followed them across the sea. Emboldened by an age-old tradition of rebellion and the Ulster philosopher Francis Hutcheson's democratic precepts that found their way into the Declaration of Independence, Revolutionary politics was apparently embraced by a majority (though by no means all) of Ulster Irish colonists. They made up much of Washington's army and elsewhere supplied the bulk of the forces winning key Revolutionary War battles such as Cowpens and Kings Mountain.
After the Revolutionary War Ulster Irish immigrants and their descendants spread throughout the Ohio Valley, Kentucky and Tennessee, and the Southeastern states. In the 19th century their numbers were significant among settlers in Texas, the Great Plains, and the Far West. "Ulster Scots followed the westward-moving frontier so closely that Scotch-Irish and frontiersman are almost synonymous terms in American history books," Richard MacMaster observes. Though they had mostly lost an overt sense of Irish or Scottish identity, they unconsciously carried on some centuries-old traits and philosophies and passed them into mainstream American culture.
The folk culture of the South has a major root directly connected to the soil of Ulster Speech, domestic architecture, farming methods, and other folkways survived in modified form in Southern and Western culture particularly. The Irish, Scottish, and English ballads and dance tunes they brought from Ulster were ancestral to American country music and Appalachian folk dance. The vernacular architecture of the Piedmont and mountain areas of the Carolinas and Georgia was an adaptation (the Appalachian log cabin being essentially an Ulster cottage made out of wood), and a host of other folkways from skillet breads to home-brewed whiskey.
Linguist Michael Montgomery calls speech the most definable link. While Southern Highlands and Ulster speech no longer sound much alike, Southern Highlanders strongly maintain elements of vocabulary and most especially grammar from the language brought to these shores by Ulster immigrants in the 18th century. "Though it was brought from quite a small area, the Ulster influence on American English is more substantial than almost any other from the old world," he argues.
Beyond these characteristics most dominant in the South, there have been broader Scotch-Irish influences on the national culture. Their Presbyterianism was significant in laying the foundations of American Protestantism and the ideal of universal education. Some authorities see the views and traits evident among Ulster folk during the American Revolution as helping set the tone for American's dominant conservative to moderate political and social views. They are viewed as having largely embraced basic patriotism, capitalism, democracy, self-reliance, thrift, strong work ethic, and fervent expansionism.
Where Scotch-Irish Presbyterians migrated, schools and colleges soon followed. Presbyterians founded more colleges and universities than any other denomination in pre-Civil War America. Prof. Katharine Brown credits the Scotch-Irish with laying the foundation for the American traditions of public and higher education. With the strong priority they set on educating homegrown ministers, they hastened to build schools in every settlement. Colleges and universities soon followed. The College of New Jersey at Princeton, Hampden-Sydney and Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in Virginia, and Dickinson College in Pennsylvania became mother institutions to dozens of Presbyterian colleges and universities.
The level of and emphasis on education among Ulster-originated Americans was among the highest of European immigrant groups. So how did the stereotype of the ignorant Scotch-Irish "hillbilly" emerge? Scholars such as North Carolina historian Tyler Blethen see its origins in "Civil War devastation, agricultural competition from the Midwest, the exploitation of its natural resources (coal, timber) by outsiders, and post-Civil war politics." The Appalachian areas of Southern states had been basically Union territory and remained faithful to the "party of Lincoln." For more than a century afterward, the majority Democratic legislatures of their states punished them by spending disproportionately low state tax revenues on their needs. In these regions poverty and illiteracy became widespread as the 19th Century progressed.
By this time the Scotch-Irish had spread throughout most of the U.S., settling territories wrested often by force from their indigenous inhabitants. As they had with native Irish, Ulster folk got along with American Indians willing to get along and fought to the death with those who were not. However, the stereotype of the Scotch-Irish Indian-fighting bigots (e.g. the Paxton Boys of Pennsylvania) is too general to stand up to scrutiny. President Andrew Jacksons Indian removal policies put him at odds with fellow Ulster descendants David Crockett and Sam Houston a story that demonstrates conflicted Scotch-Irish views on expansionism displacement.
Presbyterian scholar Erskine Clarke suggests that the Scotch-Irish have always been a people caught between two competing impulses inherent in Calvinism: a craving for harmony and balance on the one hand, and a restless fear of being boxed in on the other. Their accommodation "would mark much of the intellectual life of Presbyterianism and those who trace their ancestry to the Scotch-Irish. And that is a quest for some middle way to bridge these competing impulses," Clarke suggests.
The transformations - "from heavy-drinking, politically radical frontiersmen and urban artisans to respectable, church-going entrepreneurs - could never be total or thorough," observes Kerby Miller. "and so the result was contradictions between some persisting realities and the new images. I see paradoxes and contradictions as what make these people interesting."
"Scotch-Irish" or "Scots-Irish" - what's correct?
Take your pick. We believe in calling people what they call themselves. The term "Scotch-Irish" has had centuries of historical usage and has for more than a century been the most common self-identification. "Scots-Irish" has come into vogue in some circles, largely academic, in the past very few decades.
