Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680–1830

Searching for “Irish” Freedom—Settling for “Scotch-Irish” Respectability: Southwestern Pennsylvania, 1780–1810

Searching for “Irish” Freedom—Settling for “Scotch-Irish” Respectability: Southwestern Pennsylvania, 1780–1810 Peter Gilmore Kerby A. Miller Most histories of Scots-Irish1 settlement in the New World end triumphantly with the American Revolution. In the half-century or so after the Revolution, however, many more Ulster Presbyterians (with other Irish immigrants) left Ireland for the United States than had journeyed to Britain’s North American colonies in the one hundred years prior to 1776. More important, it is arguable that the three decades following the achievement of American independence comprised a crucial, formative era of Scots-Irish social, political , and cultural development. Between 1780 and 1810, various groups of Ulster Presbyterians contended with each other to achieve social control, political power, and cultural hegemony over the Ulster American community and to define its relationships with Anglo-America’s social and political hierarchies. This contest paralleled a similar struggle within northern Ireland itself, where the same decades saw the flowering and collapse of the radical, republican strains in Ulster Presbyterianism, as the euphoria engendered by the Irish Volunteers and the French Revolution was destroyed in 1798 by the failure of the United Irish Rebellion and in 1800 by the Act of Union. Indeed, events in Ulster were intimately related to developments in the United States, for northern Presbyterians who migrated to the New World to fulfill “Irish” dreams of “freedom” often discovered that, in an increasingly stratified and fragmented Ulster American society, the best they could achieve was a newly defined “Scotch-Irish” respectability. Many readers may find alleged associations between Ulster Presbyterians and “Irish” nomenclature and characteristics to be startling or even discomfiting . The reason, of course, is that by the late nineteenth century Americans 166 Peter Gilmore and Kerby A. Miller of Ulster Presbyterian birth or ancestry had become known as “Scotch-Irish,” whereas the “Irish” label in the United States was now almost exclusively confined to Catholic immigrants and their descendants. Indeed, by the late 1800s, the meaning of “Scotch-Irish” had expanded informally to include all Protestants of Irish birth or background. Equally important, this ethnoreligious dichotomy was also a hierarchy, since all but Irish American Catholics themselves regarded the “Scotch-Irish” as the socially, culturally, and even morally superior group. In the eighteenth century, however, and well into the nineteenth, the “Irish” label, with or without a religious qualification, was the term most commonly employed to designate Ulster Presbyterians (and other Irish Protestants) on both sides of the ocean; this was true of Ulster Presbyterians themselves as well as of contemporary observers, whether sympathetic or hostile. By contrast, according to historian James Leyburn, the term “Scotch-Irish” was rarely employed, either before or immediately after the American Revolution.2 Arguably, in the early 1700s, the term “Irish,” when applied to Ulster Presbyterians of Scottish ancestry, had merely geographic connotations, referring to domicile or birthplace or, in the case of Ulster immigrants in America, to their immediate country of origin. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century , however, among many Ulster Presbyterians (and other Irish Protestants) a new “Irish” identity had acquired broad, positive, and “patriotic” political and other associations. Unlike the previous century, it was no longer confined to Ireland’s defeated and degraded Catholics, and so it no longer signified only the negative characteristics (savagery, superstition, ignorance, poverty, and so on) generally ascribed to that group in Anglo-American Protestant culture. In America the new “Irish” label, with its favorable associations , was for a time even fashionable. In the merchant communities of colonial American seaports, for instance, Ulster Presbyterians and other Irish immigrants of all religions found it socially advantageous to club together in distinctively “Irish” organizations. Moreover, as James Caldwell, an Ulster-born member of Philadelphia’s St. Patrick’s Society, proudly attested, by 1774 those he called “the Irish” in America (comprised overwhelmingly of northern Presbyterians, like himself) were widely admired for their devotion to the political principles that soon produced the American Revolution.3 That devotion was in turn a reflection of similar developments taking place in Ireland itself, as Ulster’s Presbyterians were disproportionately prominent in the liberal Patriot and Volunteer movements of the 1770s and 1780s and in the radical and, eventually, revolutionary Society of United Irishmen in the 1790s. Inspired by the American Revolution and, after 1789, by the French Searching for “Irish” Freedom—Settling for “Scotch-Irish” Respectability 167 Revolution, both movements sought to...