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

Introduction: From the North of Ireland to North America: The Scots-Irish and the Migration Experience

Introduction From the North of Ireland to North America: The Scots-Irish and the Migration Experience Warren R. Hofstra American history, especially early American history, has long been narrated as a migration experience. The movement of English peoples to the portion of mainland North America that became the United States has traditionally dominated the story. The sites of English contact—Jamestown, Plymouth, Philadelphia, Charleston—have become those places where the story—the hardships, the struggle, the courage, the conquests—has been most clearly and forcefully articulated. Americans visit these places today in large numbers to better understand the origins of their nation and the sources of their history. During the past several decades, however, and due to abundant new work by historians, archaeologists, geographers, and other scholars or writers, the story of the United States as a nation of immigrants has become much larger and more complex, both conceptually and geographically. This development is nowhere more true than for early America, where the settlement areas of varied European nations have gained in significance and influence. British America now includes Caribbean islands as well as the Canadian northeast . Spanish borderlands have been fully integrated into the American story, as have the vast interior territories of French settlement, including Louisiana , Illinois, and the pays d’en haut. Dutch outposts have gained in importance , and even Russian settlements along the Pacific Coast have attracted xii Warren R. Hofstra the attention of American historians. Regarding Africa, early American history can no longer be considered apart from the ethnic origins and cultural experiences of millions of African Americans whose story now begins not on the North American coast but in hundreds of communities spread throughout Central and West Africa. And where Native Americans were once regarded , along with the environment, as an object of conquest, they now are considered active agents not only in their own autonomous histories but also in the full panorama of the American past. Places once considered peripheral have come squarely into the focal range of academic research as well as popular attention. No longer can early American history and the movement of peoples into and around the Americas be chronicled without accounts of Barbados, St. Augustine, St. Johns, Halifax, Quebec, Detroit, Santa Fe, New Orleans, the French towns of the Illinois Country, and hundreds of Native American towns from Onondaga to Coweta, Cahokia to Acoma. There is, however, no single place or collection of sites on American soil that stands out in the story of one of the largest migrant populations in early American history—the Scots-Irish. There is no Jamestown or Plymouth Rock, Williamsburg or Sturbridge Village for these folk from the north of Ireland variously called Scotch-Irish, Ulster Scots, Irish, or sometimes Irish Protestants. Population estimates vary, but upwards of one hundred fifty thousand of them came in numerous waves during the so-called “long eighteenth century” lasting from 1680 to 1830, the extended period during which imperial wars, colonial expansion, political revolutions, and the inevitable mass displacement of European populations engulfed the Atlantic world. A significant portion of this number of Scots-Irish arrived between the 1713 Peace of Utrecht and the American Revolution some sixty years later. Although families and communities were found throughout North America, the large majority helped occupy a broad arc of interior frontier extending from central Pennsylvania to the Georgia upcountry. Theirs was a region defined more by cultural pluralism and intercultural encounters than by the imprint of any single ethnic identity. The Scots-Irish found themselves among large numbers of German-speaking immigrants and other settlers with Anglo-American, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English, Dutch, or French backgrounds. Native Americans were dispersed throughout the entire region because it was, of course, their homeland. But it is the Scots-Irish and the character of the region they helped shape that compose the subject of essays included in this book. That there is no single place where the historian or the public can visit and reflect on the Scots-Irish experience in America is not to say that it has Introduction xiii been suppressed or its people beaten down as a historical underclass. But some have suggested that the cultural identity of the Scots-Irish was never sufficiently strong to resist the force of Americanization—that the ScotsIrish simply became indistinguishable and were lost in the rising middle class of nineteenth-century America. Others, however, have argued the opposite: due...