Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680-1830 (review)

As historians increasingly find themselves defending their profession, they may take solace that their role as "myth-buster" remains secure. During the past decade, a number of American politicians have found it beneficial to advance an uncomplicated historical narrative of one of America's earliest ethnic groups— the Scots-Irish. Ireland's Presbyterian immigrants, so the story goes, isolated themselves culturally, embraced a warlike ethos, fought the establishment, and embodied the individualism quintessential to conservative memories of the American Revolution.

With a refreshing degree of coherence, Ulster to America takes aim at such monolithic, racialized depictions. The Scots-Irish identity was not "determined, diffusionist, and immutable," argues the book's editor Warren R. Hofstra, but rather, "conditioned and conditional." Moreover, in contrast to their reputation as backcountry people, these immigrants created a more cosmopolitan America. From seaports to frontier outposts, they engaged in transcontinental networks of commercial, intellectual, and cultural exchange. The Scots-Irish were, in Hofstra's words, "receptive to and reflexive of the main currents of historical change throughout the Atlantic world,"

With attentiveness to time and place, the historians collected in this volume demythologize popular conceptions of an isolated, individualistic, "frontier" people born to fight. For example, where Richard K. MacMaster concedes that the Scotch-Irish of early eighteenth-century Donegal Springs, Pennsylvania, emphasized individualism in their search for religious "order," he finds later generations in nearby Carlisle valuing community amidst an "expanding consumer revolution." Similarly, Hofstra's analysis of mid-eighteenth-century shop inventories from the isolated region of Opequon, Virginia, demonstrates how a people with limited access to money traded surpluses at a "dispersed general store," thereby creating a community of economic interdependency. Hofstra also challenges the notion of an inherent warlike predisposition by reminding his readers that gents of the British Empire encouraged both Scots-Irish and German Protestants to settle this region in order to hinder French Catholic expansion. In the afterword, Robert M. Calhoon argues that the Scots-Irish negotiated conflict based upon a culture of "historic moderation." Compellingly, he finds examples of this "framework for survival and equanimity in the midst of intense social strife and political conflict" within many essays of this volume.

Ulster to America contributes to the recent dialogue over "identity" constructs and the "Scotch-Irish." Through the 1990s, such historians as Grady McWhiney (Cracker Culture) and David Hackett Fischer (Albion's Seed) emphasized what they saw as enduring folkways of the "Scotch-Irish" migration. Recently, however, Patrick Griffin challenged this premise in The People with No Name (2001) by rejecting a static concept of identity and arguing that movement characterized the "nameless" Presbyterian migrants of Ulster. While the essayists of this compilation accept Griffin's basic argument, they debate a more precise nomenclature in the footnotes. MacMaster and Michael Montgomery, for instance, employ the term "Scotch-Irish," due to its "purely American" origins and relatively "common usage" in the eighteenth century. Hofstra adopts the term "Scots-Irish" precisely because it "has no tradition of historical usage" and therefore "evades partisan association or affiliation." Peter Gilmore and Kerby A. Miller emphasize the historicity of the word "Irish," as it was "the term most commonly employed to designate Ulster Presbyterians (and other Irish Protestants) on both sides of the ocean." Patrick Griffin continues to stress the ambiguity of the term—utilizing "Irish" for the historical experience and "Scotch-Irish" when discussing identity. The disputes over terminology underscore the inadequacy of any simple, triumphalist account of the group's experience; these disagreements bolster rather than detract from the book's overarching argument.

Ulster to America is structured chronologically and by migratory order. Each chapter title depicts the Scots-Irish experience as a "search" for something— in most cases reflecting key historiographical debates in Atlantic history. In "Searching for a New World," David W. Miller eschews cultural transference by arguing that Presbyterianism, "the most identifiable surviving baggage of the Scots-Irish immigrations," was not a "precious family heirloom," and that...