The Scotch-Irish: A Social History.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962 (reprinted 1989 and after).
(Book information at Amazon.com, University of North Carolina Press.)
In the early 1600s the new King of England, James Stuart (James VI of Scotland (1567-1625), James I of England (1603-1625)) proclaimed the Plantation of Ulster in northern Ireland. Its purpose was to subdue and crowd out the Roman Catholic Irish who resisted English rule and in their place settle Protestants from England and lower Scotland. Thus large numbers of Lowland Scots (Presbyterians) emigrated to northern Ireland to become the "Ulster Scots." Highland Scots, regarded as Roman Catholics and savages, were explicitly excluded from this Protestant-only migration. The migration of Scots to Ulster continued on and off through the religious upheavals and wars in England and Scotland of the seventeenth century until economic conditions improved in Scotland with the unification of Scotland and England in 1707 by the Act of Union. Leyburn nicely describes the economic, cultural, political, and religions forces which promoted migration from Scotland to nearby northern Ireland (six of the nine counties of Ulster).
The Ulster Scots prospered throughout the seventeenth century. There is some debate and uncertainty about the degree to which the Presbyterian Ulster Scots may have intermarried with the native Roman Catholic Irish whom they had displaced. Leyburn throughly presents the arguments both for and against intermarriage, concluding that the degree of intermarriage was low. Hence the American Scotch-Irish are considered decendents of Scotland rather than of Ireland (there is no question about this with respect to culture and religion).
In the eighteenth century various forces combined to encourage the Ulster Scots to emigrate again, this time to the American colonies where they would become know as the Scotch-Irish. Three factors stand out: (1) English oppression. (a) The Ulster woolen industry became so successful by the late seventeenth century that English interests obtained from the King and Parliament the Woolens Act of 1699 "prohibiting the exportation of Irish wool and woolen cloth to any place except England and Wales. This prohibition left the foreign and colonial markets wholly to the English. ... Here was a crippling blow to the most prosperous industry in Ulster. (page 159)" (b) Queen Anne's Test Act of 1702 allowed only members of the Church of England to hold public office and teach in schools. The Test Act was mainly intended to exclude Roman Catholics from such offices, but the Ulster Scot Presbyterians who had risen to hold many offices lost all social standing. (2) During the seventeenth century Ulster Scot land tenants had become well established on their farms under long term leases. In the eighteenth century, when those long term leases expired, landlords increased rents, which their tenants could not afford ("rack-rents"). The prospect of land ownership in America motivated many evicted tenants to emigrate. (3) Poor weather and subsequent crop failures initiated discrete waves of emigration to America by Ulster Scots. Although Ulstermen emigrated to American throughout the period 1717 to 1775, pronounced waves of emigration occurred in 1717-18 (drought and subsequent crop failure, rack-rents), 1725-29 (general economic decline in Ireland, rack-rents), 1740-41 (famine in Ireland), 1754-55 (positive news from American settlers, drought in Ulster), and 1771-1775 (leases expired in county Antrim, Ulster). Between 1717 and the start of the American War of Independence, when war-time conditions suppressed population movements, it is estimated that approximately 250,000 Ulster Scots emigrated to the American colonies.
The Scotch-Irish settlement in America moved progressively south during the eighteenth century as northern areas filled first, moving along the inland "Great Philadelphia Wagon Road," which was extended over the course of the century from Philadelphia as the immigration frontier moved further south: through the southeastern counties of Pennsylvania and through the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania, through the Shenandoah Valley in Virgnina (the Scotch-Irish did not settle in large numbers in Maryland where the Established Church was Roman Catholic), through the Piedmont region of the Carolinas. The Scotch-Irish thus settled in the backcountry areas of the southern colonies as farmers; they were not the plantation owners of the eastern parts of those colonies, which formed the dominant classes of those colonies. This is not to say that there were no Scotch-Irish settlers in other colonies nor on the eastern shores; there were, as Leyburn describes; however, there numbers were relatively smaller. Following the successful War of Independence, people began to move west across the Allegany and Appalachian Mountains; Leyburn says that in this western migration ethnic distinctions (e.g., English, Scotch-Irish, German, Scottish) and state origins (e.g., Virginia, Pennsylvania) became less prominant as intermingling and intermarriage yielded simply Americans. This book does not extend far beyond the American War of Independence. Migration from Ulster resumed after the American Revolution, but lacked the community-based nature of the earlier migration. The book ends with excellent chapters on frontier society, the Presbyterian church, and the Scotch-Irish in politics.
Leyburn cautions us against the literature of the early twentieth century by those who made sweeping claims "... insistently attributing much of the best in American political tradition to Scotch-Irish pioneers. According to these eulogists, the original democratic influence in the country came from the Scotch-Irish; they contributed the deciding forces to the in the Revolutionary War; they helped shape the Constitution, giving the nation its republican form of government; and after 1789 they provided presidents, justices, legislators, and governors far in excess of their proportional numbers. All of these contributions (and others) were claimed to be the natural and inevitable results of the inherent fine qualities of Scotch-Irish character and of Presbyterianism. (page 296)" No doubt there have been many prominant Americans of Scotch-Irish descent. But "it is misleading, however, to assume that their achievement resulted from some mysterious genetic quality transmitted from generation to generation by the Scotch-Irish heredity or even that Scotch-Irish culture was so uniform and integrated that it necessarially resulted in political leadership. ... It is not evident that other stocks might not name an even more impressive list of political leaders to emphasize the superiority of their heritage. (page 315)" It seems possible that the recent book by James Webb may have fallen into this error.
Other Books:
- Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer.
- From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers by Allan Kulikoff.
- A History of Ulster by Jonathan Bardon.
- The Great Wagon Road: From Philadelphia to the South by Parke Rouse.
- The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764 by Patrick Griffin.
- Scots Irish in Pennsylvania & Kentucky by Bill Kennedy.
- At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America by Eric Hinderaker and Peter C. Mancall.
- Carolina Cradle: Settlement of the Northwest Carolina Frontier, 1747-1762 by Robert W. Ramsey.
- Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by James Webb.