The Scotch-Irish Mirgration

The following is abstracted from The Scotch-Irish, A Social History by James G. Leyburn, published by The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, copyright 1962, ISBN 0-8078-4259-1, LOC Cat.#62-16063. This publication covers the whole migration of lowland Scots from Scotland to Ireland beginning in 1610, then to America in the 1700's, and finally, across the mountains to the Pennsylvania frontiers and down the valleys into Virginia and the Carolinas. This abstract sketches the waves of migration from Ulster to America. There were five great waves of emigration, with a lesser flow in the intervening years. An analysis of the tides of 1717-18, 1725-29, 1740-41, 1754-55, and 1771-75 provides, in effect, a chart of the economic health of northern Ireland.

1717-18

This first movement, so significant as a path-opener, had as its immediate cause the years of drought; but it was the opinion of Archbishop King and Dean Swift that not even the dire effects of bad crops and high prices would have been enough to make the people move if they had not had the added goad of rack-renting*, still such a novel practice that it caused intense resentment. In a letter of 1718 to the Archbishop of Canterbury, King summed up the causes and tried to persuade his colleague to use his influence to arouse the English conscience to a realization of the effects of what was happening. He charged: "I find likewise that your Parliament is destroying the little Trade that is left us. These & other Discouragements are driving away the few Protestants that are amongst us. ...No Papists stir except young men that go abroad to be trained to arms, with intention to return with the Pretender. The Papists being already five or six to one, & a breeding People, you may imagine in what conditions we are like to be." . . .

In a sense, the emigrants of 1717 would be explorers whose report on their experiences could guide those who came after. The Ulstermen who went to Boston found unexpected difficulties and a welcome that lacked warmth. Those who followed them in the next two years were made to understand that they were not at all welcome. The people who entered America by the Delaware River, on the other hand, found a land of the heart's desire. Their enthusiastic praise of Pennsylvania persuaded others to follow them, and then still others, until by 1720 "to go to America" meant, for most emigrants from Ulster, to take ship for the Delaware River ports and then head west. For the entire fifty-eight years of the Great Migration, the large majority of Scotch-Irish made their entry to America through Philadelphia or Chester or New Castle.

*Rack-rent was simply raising the rent on the land after the period of the lease had expired, and renting to the highest bidder. Lease terms in Ulster were usually 31 years, much longer than they had been in Scotland, and were reasonable in the 17th century. As more and more immigrants came in and land became scarce landlords could get more for use of their land. However, the dispossessed, who had been there for a generation or two, were outraged.

1725-29 

The second wave was so large that not merely the friends of Ireland but even the English Parliament became concerned. Parliament appointed a commission to investigate the causes of the departures, for they had reached proportions that portended a loss of the entire Protestant element in Ulster.

Letters from immigrants themselves spoke of rack-rents as a determining cause of this second wave; but the Pennsylvania Gazette mentioned these as only one of the "unhappy Circumstances of the Common People of Ireland" that had resulted in so great an exodus. An article in that journal (November 20, 1729) reported "that Poverty, Wretchedness, Misery and Want are become almost universal among them; that . . . there is not Corn enough rais'd for their Subsistence one Year with another; and at the same Time the Trade and Manufactures of the Nation being cramp'd and discourag'd, the labouring People have little to do, and consequently are not able to purchase Bread at its present Rate; That the Taxes are nevertheless exceeding heavy, and Money very scarce; and add to all this, that their griping, avaricious Landlords exercise over them the most merciless Racking Tyranny and Oppression. Hence it is that such Swarms of them are driven over into America."

1740-41 

Famine struck Ireland in 1740* and was certainly the principal occasion for the third large wave, which included numbers of substantial Ulstermen. An estimated 400,000 persons died in Ireland during 1740-41; for the next decade there was a tremendous exodus to America. This third wave marked, on the American side, the first movement of Scotch-Irish in any numbers beyond the confines of generous Pennsylvania to the southwest. Following the path through the Great Valley, many Ulstermen now went into the rich Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, whose southern extremity opens out toward North and South Carolina. Arthur Young, writing in 1779, estimated that between 1728 and 1750 Ulster lost a quarter of her trading cash and probably a quarter of her population that had been engaged in manufacture. His comment, if accurate, suggests the caliber of men now leaving the country.

*Not to be confused with the potato crop failure that was the cause of the great Catholic Irish migration in 1845-47.

1754-55

The fourth exodus had two major causes; effective propaganda from America and calamitous drought in Ulster. A succession of governors of North Carolina had made a special effort to attract to that province colonists from Ulster and from Scotland. That two of these officials were themselves Ulstermen lent persuasiveness to their invitation and appeal. As drought ravaged the countryside, testimony of Scotch-Irish success in American struck a particularly responsive chord in hearts back home.

At this moment, however, the Scotch-Irish pioneers had their first taste of real trouble with the Indians. The French and Indian wars broke out in the colonies and were to last for more than seven years. For the time being, these violent disturbances effectively dried up the source of new immigration. More than this, Ulster was just now undergoing a true economic recovery. Her prosperity was so pronounced that the vacuum left by emigrants began to be filled by arrivals of people from the south of Ireland and from Scotland. Her population began to increase apace; indeed, it was the pressure of numbers, combined with a new economic depression, that caused the final large wave of migration.

1771-75 

Young, writing in 1779, when the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War had eliminated the possibility of further emigration, said that the people of Ulster had by 1770 become very poor, living chiefly "on potatoes and milk and oat bread," and that their little farms had been divided and subdivided until "the portions were so small they cannot live on them." More than this, the shipowners at the ports of Belfast and Derry were in distress because their "passage trade, as it was called," which had long been a regular branch of commerce, was now cut off.

There was, however, a special reason for the departure of this final wave. In 1771, when the leases on the large estate of the Marquis of Donegal in county Antrim expired, the rents were so greatly advanced that scores of tenants could not comply with the demands and so were evicted from farms their families had long occupied. This aroused a spirit of resentment so intense that an immediate and extensive emigration was the consequence. During the next three years nearly a hundred vessels sailed from the ports in the North of Ireland, "carrying as many as 25,000 passengers, all Presbyterian." Froude gives an even larger figure: "In the two years which followed the Antrim evictions, thirty thousand Protestants left Ulster. ...

Religious Liberty

Throughout the fifty-eight years of the Great Migration, religious liberty had been a motive only at the beginning. It is nevertheless significant, both for Ireland and America, that those who left Ulster were almost all Presbyterians. Members of the Established Church rarely went, nor did Roman Catholic Irishmen. ...

All of the thirteen original American colonies received Scotch-Irish settlers. By comparison with the main stream that flowed through Pennsylvania, the Valley of Virginia, and the Carolina Piedmont, however, Scotch-Irish settlement in other colonies was insignificant in numbers. The strength of Presbyterianism in many of the colonies (New Jersey, for example) was not, as might be supposed, evidence of Scotch-Irish settlement, on the contrary, most of these churches had been founded by English and Welsh Presbyterians and many by immigrants directly from Scotland.

Distinction between the Scots and Ulsters

A clear distinction should be made at this point between colonists from Scotland and those from Ulster, for the two have often, to the complete distortion of events, been thought identical. It has already been noted that by 1717 Scots and Ulstermen were two different nationalities. Extensive emigration from Scotland to America occurred during the eighteenth century, possibly a fourth or a fifth as large as that from Ulster; but the reasons for Scottish emigration were distinct. Before the union of the two Crowns in 1707, many Scots were exiled as criminals and many more came as indentured servants or as merchants to America. After the Union, since Scots had equal rights with Englishmen, including the right of moving to the colonies, thousands came over to escape the grinding poverty at home. Defeat of the Highlanders in 1746, after the collapse of the Stuart cause, with the determination of the government to "civilize" these people, caused a large exodus; and the enclosure of lands, the dispossession of tenants, and the consequent dissolution of ties of personal loyalty binding man to chief, sent thousands of others to America. The pull from the colonies was, as usual, the opportunity for a better life. At times during the nineteenth century there came to be a positive "rage for emigration" throughout both Lowlands and Highlands.

Scots in America from the first showed traits clearly different from those of the Scotch-Irish. Scots were seldom explorers, Indian fighters, or frontier traders; they played only a minor role as pioneers, preferring to settle in the east and to carry on business enterprises. Their greatest difference from their Ulster cousins, however, was seen at the time of the American Revolution: whereas the Scotch-Irish were usually ardent patriots and notable fighters in the cause of the colonies, the Scots were, with notable exceptions, Loyalists faithful to the Crown. Only in their Presbyterianism and a few of their traits of personality did they resemble the Scotch-Irish. In North Carolina the Highland Scots for a long while retained their Gaelic language and even their Highland dress.

Children and grandchildren of the original Scotch-Irish settlers in America were always among the leaders in the move to the new West; but they were no longer Scotch-Irish in their social characteristics and outlook. Just as they were likely to become Methodists and Baptists instead of remaining Presbyterians, so they were likely to marry persons whose background may have been English or German. The memory of Ulster and its respectabilities and distinctions meant little or nothing to these constant pioneers. They were Americans.

[The Scotch-Irish] moved immediately upon arrival to a region where there was neither a settlement nor an established culture. He held land, knew independence, had manifold responsibilities from the very outset. He spoke the language of his neighbors to the East through whose communities he had passed on his way to the frontier. Their institutions and standards differed at only minor points from his own. The Scotch-Irish were not, in short, a "minority group" and needed no Immigrant Aid society to tide them over a period of maladjustment so that they might become assimilated in the American melting pot. Like all people, whether immigrants or stay-at-homes, they must have known individual discouragement and disappointment; some may even have had a heightened feeling of inner loneliness, a quality of mind Weber attributes to most Calvinists who reflect upon the implications of the doctrine of predestination. But to the extent that their neighbors shared similar experiences and attitudes, without pressure from other Americans to be different, the Scotch-Irish were not ... marginal men. They were, on the contrary, full Americans almost from the moment they took up their farms in the back-country.

*Although Scotch-Irish immigrants arrived all along America’s Atlantic coast, the major flow of newcomers landed in Pennsylvania. That sea route was driven by the important trade that linked the port of Philadelphia with Ulster ports. After unloading their American cargoes in Ulster, ship captains filled their vessels with emigrants for the return trip. As more and more Ulster people traveled to America, encouraging tales of its widespread opportunities flowed back to Ulster. This migration grew steadily until the outbreak of the American Revolution; after a decade of interruption  by war, it picked up again at a slower pace until the 1820s. 

Most Scotch-Irish emigrants to America traveled in family groups. Upon arrival in Philadelphia, some were forced to accept indentured servitude to pay off their travel costs. But once their indenture ended, typically after seven years, they were free to pursue their own fortunes. Land in America was abundant and cheap. For decades most immigrants could take up enough land to support a family through farming, often paying only minimal fees known as quitrents. The earliest arrivals filled the fertile soils of southeastern Pennsylvania. But as the flow continued, latecomers had to seek land claims further inland. The mountainous geography of Pennsylvania’s western interior, combined with its hostile Indian inhabitants, encouraged many of them to turn southwestward instead, into Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. That region of mild climate and fertile soils drew a steady influx of settlers from the 1720s on.  But eventually the backcountry of Pennsylvania and Virginia could not accommodate all of the immigrants who kept arriving. By the time of the Revolution, and in its immediate aftermath, the flow of settlers moved onward. By the 1780s it had pushed into the western Appalachian Mountain region of the Carolinas, [Kentucky] and Tennessee. These settlers found a less favorable farming environment than their predecessors who had obtained land in the Shenandoah Valley.

Resource: http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mcclell2/homepage/migrate.htm
Resource: http://digitalheritage.org/2011/12/the-migration-of-the-scotch-irish-from-ulster-to-western-north-carolina/

The Scots-Irish: The Thirteenth Tribe

Thanks to Raymond Campbell Paterson
Reprint from: www.ulsterancestry.com/ulster-scots

"I love Highlanders, and I love Lowlanders, but when I come to that branch of our race that has been grafted on to the Ulster stem I take off my hat in veneration and awe."
Lord Rosebery

Sidenote: According to a census in 1640, it was estimated that there were 100,000 Scots who had resettled in Ulster, and only about 20,000 of whom were from England.

Let us begin by asking a simple question-who are the Scots-Irish?  Simple questions very rarely have simple answers, and the answer to this one is more complex than most.  Much depends, moreover, on where in the world it is posed.  In Britain the term is virtually unknown, and most people would assume that it meant some kind of hybridisation between the Irish and the Scots.  Only the Protestant communities of Northern Ireland would generally recognise what is meant, though very few would now accept the designation for themselves, preferring to be described as British or Ulstermen.  Only in North America, where the term was invented, would one be likely to encounter an immediate recognition; but even here there are problems.  Many of the descendants of the original Scots-Irish settlers would happily wear kilts and tartan on commemorative days, though this would have been a shock to their ancestors, who took particular trouble to distance themselves from all things Celtic and Gaelic.  The task of this article is to attempt what is always a dangerous endeavour: the separation of myth and reality, and thus uncover the roots of one of the most remarkable branches of the Scottish-and Irish-race.

Irish Uprising in 1603

The story begins with an ending.  In March 1603, the same month that James VI of Scotland began James I of England and Ireland, the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, chiefs of the O’Neills and the O’Donnells, the leading families of the ancient province of Ulster, surrender to the English.  Thus concluded the Nine Years War, the latest in a long line of struggles to arrest the steady expansion of English power in Ireland.  It was in Ulster that Celtic Ireland had made its last stand against a foreign invader, all the more unwelcome because he now came garbed in a cloak of militant Protestantism, a direct challenge to an ancient Catholic tradition.  It had been a particularly bitter struggle, and Ulster had been devastated.  The northeastern counties of Antrim and Down, within sight of the coast of Scotland, are described by contemporary writers as ‘all waste’. 

For James the conclusion of the Nine Years War came as a welcome addition to his new glories; it also presented him with a problem and an opportunity.  As a man and a king he was no more sympathetic to Gaelic traditions and culture than his Tudor predecessors on the English throne.  While still King of Scots he had been preoccupied with the problems posed by his own minorities in the Highlands and Islands, whom he once described as ‘utterly barbarous.’  In the 1590s he had even sponsored a scheme of internal colonisation or plantation, handing over the island of Lewis to a party of Lowland adventurers.  These men were to bring civilisation and commerce to the western Isles, in a project that allowed for the wholesale extermination of the local Gaelic clans.  Faced with the widespread hostility of the Highland communities, the Lewis plantation was a costly failure: the idea, however, remained fixed in the royal mind.

In Ulster, unlike the Scottish Highlands, the local people had been severely demoralised. Plantation was not a new idea in Ireland, but past schemes had achieved very little.  To begin with James showed little interest in a fresh project but for a series of unusual opportunities.  The first involved two rather shady Lowland opportunists, the kind of men all too attractive to the enterprising king.  James Hamilton was a university don and a spy; and Sir Hugh Montgomery, his partner, was an Ayrshire laird.  Together they helped Conn O’Neill, an Irish chieftain, escape from Carrickfergus Castle, where he had been imprisoned for rioting, and offered to obtain a royal pardon for him in return for a share of his substantial estates in Antrim and Down.  James, originally hostile to the proposal, became the fourth partner in the enterprise, no doubt amused by the audacity of Hamilton and Montgomery.  Both men proposed to bring over large parties of Scots Lowlanders to replenish the depopulated areas, thus reviving the hitherto discredited idea of plantation.  James now had a way of driving a Lowland, Protestant and English-speaking wedge into the heart of a Gaelic and Catholic world.  In granting Hamilton the territory of Upper Clandeboy and Great Ardes, James emphasised the intention "…of inhabiting the same, being now depopulated and wasted, with English and Scottish men; and the carrying of men, cattle, corn and all other commodities from England and Scotland into the said territories.  Also, to have liberty to alien [grant] to any English or Scottish men, or of English and Scottish name and blood, and not to have the mere Irish."

Ireland was formally an English possession, so it was important to emphasise English as well as Scottish settlement, though for reasons of geography and temperament, the new plantation was almost exclusively Scottish, as James himself clearly recognised it would be: ‘The Scots are a middle temper, between the English tender breeding and the Irish rude breeding and are a great deal more likely to adventure to plant Ulster than the English.’

Taking the lead of Montgomery and Hamilton, land hungry Scots crossed the North Channel in ever increasing numbers.  What they found would have daunted all but the hardiest spirits: ‘…parishes were now more wasted than America (when the Spanish landed there)…for in all those three parishes [Glenabbey, Donaghadee and Newtonards] thirty cabins could not be found, nor any stone walls, but ruined roofless churches, and a few vaults at Grey Abbey, and a stump of an old castle in Newton, in each of which some gentlemen sheltered themselves at their first coming over.’  But the land was good and largely unfarmed, as the native Irish economy had been pastoral rather than arable.  Settlers were also encouraged by the promise of long leases, far better than the unfavourable terms in their native Scotland, where short leases acted as a disincentive to good husbandry and improvements.  Plantation, the Scots were soon to show, could be made to work, especially when it was supported by adequate military force.

A second and more significant opportunity came in September 1607.  Although Hugh O’Neil, Earl of Tyrone, and Hugh O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnel, had made their peace with the government some years before, they had been subject to almost continual harassment by the Dublin authorities.  Fearing for their safety, the two chiefs left for the continent, never to return, an episode famous in Irish history as ‘The Flight of the Earls.’  James now had huge territories in central and western Ulster: Hamilton and Montgomery’s free enterprise scheme was supplemented by the Plantation of Ulster.  Land was granted to men known as ‘undertakers’, who pledged themselves to bring over settlers from England and Scotland; only the more inferior lands were to be allotted to the native Irish.  This time more English settlers began to make an appearance, though they continued to be numerically weaker than their Scottish cousins.  This is hardly surprising: England was richer and far more settled than Scotland, and Ireland remained a dangerous frontier.  Native Irish chieftains, deeply resentful of their changing circumstances, took to the wilds as outlaws, and as ‘woodkernes’ represented a real threat to the more isolated settlers, many of whom were wiped out in midnight raids.  The descendants of the Scots migrants were later to face a similar threat on the American frontier.  While the Irish raiders were tough, the Scots were even tougher.  Many of the early migrants came from the Scottish borders, men with names like Armstrong, Bell and Elliot, where they had been hardened in an age-old struggle with the English. 

Despite the woodkerns-and the wolves-the Plantation survived and prospered.  In 1634 Sir William Brereton, in a journey through Ayrshire noted that: ‘Above the thousand persons have, within the last two years past, left the country wherein they lived…and are gone for Ireland.  They have come by one hundred in company through the town, and three hundred have gone on hence together, shipped for Ireland at one tide…" By 1640 it is estimated that as many as 100,000 Scots had settled in Ulster compared with some 20,000 migrants from England. 

As well as new modes of farming the Scots brought a strict Calvinist doctrine, which by the late 1630s was taking a firmly Presbyterian shape, as opposed to the episcopacy favoured by the king.  Later in the century an Anglican opponent of the puritans detailed the impact of Scottish Presbyterianism on Ulster:

"Hereupon followed the plantation of Ulster, first undertaken by the city of London, who fortified Coleraine and built Londonderry, and purchased many thousand acres of land in the parts adjoining.  But it was carried on more vigorously, as most unfortunately withal, by some adventurers of the Scottish nation who poured themselves into this country as the richer soil; and, though they were sufficiently industrious in improving their own fortunes there, and setting up preaching in all churches wheresoever they fixed, yet whether it happened for the better or the worse, the event hath showed.  For they brought with them hither such a stock of Puritanism, such as contempt of bishops, such a neglect of the public liturgy, and other divine offices of this church, that there was nothing less to be found amongst them than the government and forms of worship established in the church of England."

Charles I

Charles I, James son and successor, in attempting to force Scotland to accept the English forms of worship, took a path that led directly to the Civil Wars.  This had a profound effect on the Protestant settlers in Ulster.  Although the Scots had originally been made welcome by the English Lord Deputy in Dublin, their enthusiasm for Presbyterianism made them politically suspect.  Confronted by official hostility they faced an even greater threat in 1641 when the native Irish rose in revolt, venting years of frustration on the bewildered and badly frightened settlers. 

The colony survived, though it entered a prolonged period of stagnation and crisis, which only really came to an end with the defeat of the Catholic Jacobites in the war of 1689-1691.  During the wars the Ulster Scots had played a full part, assisting, amongst other things, in the famous siege of Londonderry.  Among their rewards they could expect, at the very least, a measure of religious toleration: after all, the revolution settlement had at last conceded the right of Scotland to a Presbyterian church after years of Stewart persecution.  But the Ulster Presbyterians were in caught in a paradox: though the reign of William of Orange brought a measure of calm, they were still subject to a religious establishment in Dublin, which remained strictly Anglican in outlook. During the reign of Queen Anne the Presbyterians, though part of the victorious Protestant party, were to find themselves just as outcast as their despised Catholic neighbours.

The successive wars had the effect of once again depopulating the fields of Ulster: many of the original settlers had been killed or had returned to Scotland for their own safety.  An appeal was made for fresh settlers, with twenty-year farm leases being held out as bait. Thus began the last great wave of Scots migration to Ulster.  In the decade up to 1700 an estimated 50,000 people made the crossing.  Politically this last wave was among the most significant, especially for the future of America and the creation of that unique outlook that was in time to be known as Scots-Irish.

By 1707, the year that the Scottish parliament merged with its English cousin, the Protestant colony of Ulster was a hundred years old.  The differences that had existed between the original settlers, whither Scots or English, had largely ceased to exist.  It is now possible to discover a distinct Protestant Ulster identity, recognisably unique and distinct from the sources of origin.  With the absence of outmoded feudalism, still present in Scotland, looser kinship ties, and a freer labour market the Ulster Protestants began to develop in an unanticipated direction.  If anything religion provided the common bond, rather than race, uniting dissenters of differing faiths, though it is also true to say that the Scots settlers had acquired a cultural domination over their English counterparts.  Though loyal to the crown, they were a people who, through decades of adversity, had become self reliant, and never quite lost the feeling that they were surrounded by a hostile world: ‘They learned from hard experience’, one commentator noted ‘that one must fight for what he has; that turning the other cheek does not guarantee property rights; in short, that might is right, at least in the matter of life and land ownership.’ In the early years of the eighteenth century they found themselves once again under attack, though this time from a totally unexpected direction. 

Division of Ulster, Northern Ireland

In 1704 the government of Queen Anne, dominated by the Anglican High Church party, passed an act that had a direct bearing on the Ulster Scots.  All office holders were obliged to take communion in the Established Church, a measure which at a single stroke virtually wiped out much of the civil administration in the north of Ireland.  It was even seriously suggested that Presbyterian ministers could be brought before Anglican church courts, charged with fornicating with their own wives.  The worst features of the new legislation was removed by the Toleration Act of 1719, but the damage had been done, and full discrimination against the Presbyterians was not finally ended until the middle of the nineteenth century.  The irony and unfairness of the new policy was pointed out, amongst others, by Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe:

‘It seems somewhat hard, and savours of the most scandalous ingratitude, that the very people who drank deepest of the popish fury, and were the most vigorous to show their zeal and their courage in opposing tyranny and popery, and on the foot of forwardness and valour the Church of Ireland recovered herself from her low condition, should now be requited with so injurious a treatment as to be linked with the very Papists they fought against…There will certainly be no encouragement to the Dissenters to join with their brethren the next time the Papists shall please to take arms and attempt their throats.  Not but they may be fools enough as they always were to stand in the gap.’ 

The Ulster Presbyterians had endured-and survived-past waves of religious discrimination, and would most likely have continued to thrive in the face of official hostility.  But in the early years of the new century they were faced with an additional challenge, one that threatened the whole basis of their economic existence in Ireland.  By 1710 most of the farm leases granted to the settlers in the 1690s had expired; new leases were withheld until the tenants agreed to pay greatly increased rents, which many could simply not afford to do.  Rather than submit to these new conditions whole communities, led by their ministers, began to take ship for the Americas: a new exodus was about to begin.  In 1719, the year after the first great wave moved west, Archbishop William King wrote an account of the migration from Ulster, pinpointing the real source of the upheaval:

‘Some would insinuate that this in some measure is due to the uneasiness dissenters have in the matter of religion, but this is plainly a mistake; for dissenters were never more easy as to that matter than they had been since the Revolution [of 1688] and are at present; and yet never thought of leaving the kingdom, till oppressed by the excessive rents and other temporal hardships: nor do any dissenters leave us, but proportionally of all sorts, except Papists.  The truth is this: after the Revolution, most of the kingdom was waste, and abandoned of people destroyed in the war: the landlords therefore were glad to get tenants at any rate, and let their lands at very easy rents; they invited abundance of people to come over here, especially from Scotland, and they lived here very happily ever since; but now their leases are expired, and they are obliged not only to give what they paid before the Revolution, but in most places double and in many places treble, so that it is impossible for people to live or subsist on their farms.’

Scot-Irish Pioneers

As the years passed thousands of people crossed the Atlantic from Ulster, just as their ancestors had crossed the North Channel from Scotland a century or more before. However, by 1750 the pace of migration began to slow, as relatively normal conditions returned to Ulster after years of economic dislocation.  The period of calm was all too brief. In 1771 a fresh wave of migration began, once again induced by the greed of the landlords, which was arguably to have serious consequences for the security of the British Empire in North America.  Faced with a fresh series of rent hikes, local people at first mounted some resistance, gathered together in an organisation known as the Hearts of Steel; but the landlords had the law and the army on their side.  In the short period left before the outbreak of the American Revolution a further 30,000 Ulstermen left for the colonies, joining some 200,000 who had already made their homes there earlier in the century.  The contemporary image of the Ulster Protestant is most commonly that of the Orangeman, with all of his exaggerated loyalty to Britain and the Crown.  For the dispossessed of the 1770s the opposite was true: they had lost everything, and came to America with an intense hostility towards all things British.

For the original Quaker and Puritan settlers of the thirteen colonies, largely English in origin, the emigrants of Ulster, an increasingly common sight, were usually described as ‘Irish.’   To counter this misconception the newcomers adopted the older description of ‘Scots’.  It was in this semantic exchange that a new breed took shape: they were the ‘Scots-Irish.’  For many years these people had lived on a frontier in Ireland, and it seemed natural for them to push on to a new frontier, where land was both plentiful and cheap, introducing a new urgency and dynamism into a rather complacent colonial society.  Before long these ‘backwoodsmen’, distrustful of all authority and government, had established a hold on the western wilderness, fighting Indians and wolves in much the same way that they had once fought wolves and woodkern.  In Pennsylvania the Scots-Irish established an almost complete domination of the outer reaches of the old Quaker colony.  It was a dangerous life, but one which has established a lasting image in American history and folklore:

‘He was a farmer so far as was needful and practicable out of the reach of all markets, though as often as not his corn was planted and his grass mown, with the long-barrelled short-stocked ponderous small-bore rifle upon which his life so often hung, placed ready and loaded against a handy stump.  What sheep he could protect from the bears and the wolves, together with a patch of flax, provided his family with covering and clothing.  Swarthy as an Indian and almost as sinewy, with hair falling to his shoulders from beneath a coon-skin cap, a buck-skin hunting shirt tied at his waist, his nether man was encased in an Indian breach-clout, and his feet clad in deer-skin and moccasins.’

With the outbreak of the Revolution in 1775 the Scots-Irish, in interesting contrast to many of their Scottish cousins, were among the most determined adherents of the rebel cause. Their frontier skills were particularly useful in destroying Burgoyne’s army in the Saratoga campaign; and George Washington was even moved to say that if the cause was lost everywhere else he would take a last stand among the Scots-Irish of his native Virginia. Serving in the British Army, Captain Johann Henricks, one of the much despised ‘Hessians’, wrote in frustration ‘Call it not an American rebellion, it is nothing more than an Irish-Scotch Presbyterian Rebellion.’  It was their toughness, virility and sense of divine mission that was to help give shape to a new nation, supplying it with such diverse heroes as Davy Crocket and Andrew Jackson.  They were indeed God’s frontiersmen, the real historical embodiment of the lost tribe of Israel. 

Migration of the Scot-Irish