Scotch-Irish Americans
Scotch-Irish (or Scots-Irish) Americans are American descendants of Ulster Scots people (predominantly Ulster Protestants) who emigrated from Ulster (Ireland's northernmost province) to the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. Their ancestors had originally migrated to Ulster mainly from the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England in the 17th century.[5][6] In the 2017 American Community Survey, 5.39 million (1.7% of the population) reported Scottish ancestry, an additional 3 million (0.9% of the population) identified more specifically with Scotch-Irish ancestry, and many people who claim "American ancestry" may actually be of Scotch-Irish ancestry.[7][8][9]
Not to be confused with Irish Americans or Irish Scottish people.The term Scotch-Irish is used primarily in the United States,[10] with people in Great Britain or Ireland who are of a similar ancestry identifying as Ulster Scots people. Many left for North America, but over 100,000 Scottish Presbyterians still lived in Ulster in 1700.[11] Many English-born settlers of this period were also Presbyterians. When King Charles I attempted to force these Presbyterians into the Church of England in the 1630s, many chose to re-emigrate to North America where religious liberty was greater. Later attempts to force the Church of England's control over dissident Protestants in Ireland led to further waves of emigration to the transatlantic colonies.[12]
The earliest is a report in June 1695, by Sir Thomas Laurence, Secretary of Maryland, that "In the two counties of and Somerset, where the Scotch-Irish are numerous, they clothe themselves by their linen and woolen manufactures."
Dorchester
In September 1723, Rev. George Ross, Rector of Immanuel Church in , wrote in reference to their anti-Church of England stance that, "They call themselves Scotch-Irish ... and the bitterest railers against the church that ever trod upon American ground."
New Castle, Delaware
Another Church of England clergyman from , commented in 1723 that "great numbers of Irish (who usually call themselves Scotch-Irish) have transplanted themselves and their families from the north of Ireland".
Lewes, Delaware
Migration[edit]
From 1710 to 1775, over 200,000 people emigrated from Ulster to the original thirteen American colonies. The largest numbers went to Pennsylvania. From that base some went south into Virginia, the Carolinas and across the South, with a large concentration in the Appalachian region. Others headed west to western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and the Midwest.[37]
Transatlantic flows were halted by the American Revolution, but resumed after 1783, with total of 100,000 arriving in America between 1783 and 1812. By that point few were young servants and more were mature craftsmen, and they settled in industrial centers, including Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New York, where many became skilled workers, foremen and entrepreneurs as the Industrial Revolution took off in the U.S. Another half million came to America 1815 to 1845; another 900,000 came in 1851–99. That migration decisively shaped Scotch-Irish culture.[37]
According to the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, there were 400,000 U.S. residents of Irish birth or ancestry in 1790 and half of this group was descended from Ulster, and half from the other three provinces of Ireland.[38]
A separate migration brought many to Canada, where they are most numerous in rural Ontario and Nova Scotia.
– 287,393 (1.1%)
Texas
– 274,149 (2.9%)
North Carolina
– 247,530 (0.7%)
California
– 170,880 (0.9%)
Florida
– 163,836 (1.3%)
Pennsylvania
– 153,073 (2.4%)
Tennessee
– 140,769 (1.8%)
Virginia
– 124,186 (1.3%)
Georgia
– 123,572 (1.1%)
Ohio
– 113,008 (2.4%)
South Carolina
Lists of Americans
Appalachia
Battle of Kings Mountain
English Americans
Hatfield–McCoy feud
Irish Americans
List of Scotch-Irish Americans
Scottish Americans
Ulster American Folk Park
Whiskey Rebellion
Scotch-Irish Canadians
(2007). Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America's Class War. Broadway Books. ISBN 978-1-921215-78-0. Cultural discussion and commentary of Scots-Irish descendants in the US.
Bageant, Joseph L.
; Morgan, Philip D., eds. (2012). Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire. University of North Carolina Press. Scholars analyze colonial migrations. online
Bailyn, Bernard
Baxter, Nancy M. Movers: A Saga of the Scotch-Irish (The Heartland Chronicles) (1986; 0-9617367-1-2) Novelistic.
ISBN
Blethen, Tyler. ed. Ulster and North America: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scotch-Irish (1997; 0-8173-0823-7), scholarly essays.
ISBN
Byrne, James Patrick; Philip Coleman; Jason Francis King (2008). . ABC-CLIO. ISBN 9781851096145.
Ireland and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History : a Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia
Carroll, Michael P. (Winter 2006). "How the Irish Became Protestant in America". . 16 (1). University of California Press: 25–54. doi:10.1525/rac.2006.16.1.25. JSTOR 10.1525/rac.2006.16.1.25. S2CID 145240474.
Religion and American Culture
Carroll, Michael P. (2007). American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination: Rethinking the Academic Study of Religion. . pp. 1–26.
Johns Hopkins University Press
Chepesiuk, Ron. The Scotch-Irish: From the North of Ireland to the Making of America ( 0-7864-0614-3)
ISBN
Dunaway, Wayland F. The Scotch-Irish of Colonial Pennsylvania (1944; reprinted 1997; 0-8063-0850-8), solid older scholarly history.
ISBN
(2006). Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-3775-9. Literary/historical family memoir of Scotch-Irish Missouri/Oklahoma family.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne
Esbenshade, Richard. "Scotch-Irish Americans." in Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America, edited by Thomas Riggs, (3rd ed., vol. 4, Gale, 2014), pp. 87–100.
Online free
(1989). Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-506905-1. Major scholarly study tracing colonial roots of four groups of immigrants, Irish, English Puritans, English Cavaliers, and Quakers; see pp. 605–778.
Fischer, David Hackett
Glasgow, Maude. The Scotch-Irish in Northern Ireland and in the American Colonies (1998; 0-7884-0945-X)
ISBN
Glazier, Michael, ed. The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, (1999), the best place to start—the most authoritative source, with essays by over 200 experts, covering both Catholic and Protestants.
Griffin, Patrick. The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World: 1689-1764 (2001; 0-691-07462-3) solid academic monograph.
ISBN
Hammock, Stephen A. Emigrants, Sails, and Scholars: A Comprehensive Review of Scots-Irish Historiography, Scots Press. (2013, 978-1-55932-318-5).
ISBN
Johnson, James E. Scots and Scotch-Irish in America (1985, 0-8225-1022-7) short overview for middle schools
ISBN
Joseph, Cameron (October 6, 2009). . The Atlantic. Retrieved October 19, 2018.
"The Scots-Irish Vote"
Jones, Maldwyn A. "Scotch-Irish." Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980): 895–908.
online
Keller, Kenneth W. "The Origins of Ulster Scots Emigration to America: A Survey of Recent Research." American Presbyterians 70.2 (1992): 71–80.
online
Kennedy, Billy. Faith & Freedom: The Scots-Irish in America (1999; 1-84030-061-2) Short, popular chronicle; he has several similar books on geographical regions
ISBN
Lewis, Thomas A. West From Shenandoah: A Scotch-Irish Family Fights for America, 1729–1781, A Journal of Discovery (2003; 0-471-31578-8)
ISBN
Leyburn, James G. Scotch-Irish: A Social History (1999; 0-8078-4259-1) written by academic but out of touch with scholarly literature after 1940
ISBN
Leyburn, James G. (December 1970). . American Heritage. Vol. 22, no. 1. Retrieved October 19, 2018.
"The Scotch-Irish"
; McWhiney, Grady (May 1975). "The Antebellum Southern Herdsman: A Reinterpretation". Journal of Southern History. 41 (2): 147–66. doi:10.2307/2206011. JSTOR 2206011. Highly influential economic interpretation; online at JSTOR through most academic libraries. Their Celtic interpretation says Scots-Irish resembled all other Celtic groups; they were warlike herders (as opposed to peaceful farmers in England), and brought this tradition to America. James Webb has popularized this thesis.
McDonald, Forrest
; Jamieson, Perry D. (1984). Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage. University of Alabama Press. ISBN 978-0817302290.
McWhiney, Grady
(1989). Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South. University of Alabama Press. ISBN 978-0817304584. Major exploration of cultural folkways.
McWhiney, Grady
Meagher, Timothy J. The Columbia Guide to Irish American History. (2005), overview and bibliographies; includes the Catholics.
, ed. (2001). Journey of Hope: The Story of Irish Immigration to America. Chronicle Books. ISBN 978-0811827836. Major source of primary documents.
Miller, Kerby
(1988). Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195051872. Highly influential study.
Miller, Kerby
Porter, Lorle. A People Set Apart: The Scotch-Irish in Eastern Ohio (1999; 1-887932-75-5) highly detailed chronicle.
ISBN
Quinlan, Kieran. Strange Kin: Ireland and the American South (2004), critical analysis of Celtic thesis.
Sherling, Rankin. The Invisible Irish: Finding Protestants in the Nineteenth-Century Migrations to America (McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP, 2015).
Sletcher, Michael, "Scotch-Irish", in Stanley I. Kutler, ed., Dictionary of American History, (10 vols., New York, 2002).0
(2008). In Search of Ulster Scots Land: The Birth and Geotheological Imagings of a Transatlantic People. University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-57003-708-5.
Vann, Barry
(2004). Rediscovering the South's Celtic Heritage. Overmountain Press. ISBN 978-1-57072-269-1.
Vann, Barry
(2007). "Irish protestants and the creation of the Bible belt". Journal of Transatlantic Studies. 5 (1). Routledge: 87–106. doi:10.1080/14794010708656856. S2CID 143386272.
Vann, Barry
Webb, James
The Ulster-Scots Society of America
Scotch-Irish Society of the USA
Ulster-Scots Language Society
Scotch-Irish or Scots-Irish: What's in a Name?
Ulster-Scots Agency
Ulster-Scots Online
Institute of Ulster-Scots
Theodore Roosevelt's genealogy
The Scotch-Irish in America (by Henry Jones Ford)
The Scotch-Irish in America (by Samuel Swett Green)
in Sketches of North Carolina by William Henry Foote (1846) - full-text history
Origin of the Scotch-Irish, Ch. 5
- full-text history with many mentions of Scotch-Irish