The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764

Notes

✜ Notes ✜ INTRODUCTION 1. On migration within the English and British Atlantic worlds, see Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA, 1999); Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York, 1986); and Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1986). The British Atlantic perspective or “new” imperial history owes much, of course, to the older imperial perspective of Charles M. Andrews and others. See Andrews, The Colonial Background of the American Revolution: Four Essays in Colonial American History (New Haven, 1931); and Richard Johnson, “Charles McLean Andrews and the Invention of American Colonial History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 43 (1986): 519–41. For a view of the state of the field, refer to the essays in Jack Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984); Bernard Bailyn and Philip Morgan, introduction to Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, 1991), 1–31; and Jack Greene, “Interpretive Frameworks: The Quest for Intellectual Order in Early American History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 48 (1991): 515–30. Bailyn covers the origins of the new Atlantic history in “The Idea of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 20 (1996): 19–44. 2. James Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill, 1962), 330; Maldwyn Jones, “The Scotch-Irish in British North America,” in Strangers within the Realm, ed. Bailyn and Morgan, 284. 3. Hector Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth -Century America, ed. A. E. Stone (New York, 1986), 85. Historians have also defined the group in such terms. Carl Bridenbaugh, for instance, portrayed America’s Scotch-Irish as “undisciplined, emotional, courageous, pugnacious , fiercely intolerant, and hard drinking, with a tendency to indolence.” See Myths and Realities: Societies of the Colonial South (New York, 1966), 133. 4. James Anderson to Thomas Penn, 26 June 1733, Penn Physick Papers, VI, 29, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (hereafter HSP). 5. John Elder to Colonel Joseph Shippen, 1 February 1764, John Elder Papers, Dauphin County Historical Society, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In fact, the name “Scotch-Irish,” an eighteenth-century term of derision, did not gain general currency until the late-nineteenth century when real and imagined descendants of settlers from Ulster embraced it to distinguish a Protestant people from Irish Catholic immigrants streaming into the country. Moreover, migrants did not call themselves “Scots Irish.” Historians created the sanitized name to reflect the origins of an American group that left Ireland but de175 N O T E S T O I N T R O D U C T I O N scended from Scots. On the problems with names for the group, see Ned Landsman, “Ethnicity and National Origin among British Settlers in the Philadelphia Region: Pennsylvania Immigration in the Wake of Voyagers to the West,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133 (1989): 170–74; Jones, “The Scotch-Irish in British North America,” 284–85; and Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, 327–34. 6. See John Elder to Edward Shippen, 4 August 1763, 1 February 1764, Elder Papers. 7. To call the Presbyterians, who had migrated from Scotland to Ulster over the course of the seventeenth century, “Ulster Scots” smacks of anachronism. The term, coupling ethnic and geographical designations, came into use in Ireland only after the eighteenth century. See Toby Barnard, “Identities, Ethnicity and Tradition among Irish Dissenters c. 1650–1750,” and Raymond Gillespie , “Dissenters and Nonconformists, 1661–1700,” in The Irish Dissenting Tradition, 1650–1750, ed., Kevin Herlihy (Dublin, 1995), 29–48, 11–28. 8. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992). This approach has been dubbed the “new” British history since the publication of two articles by J.G.A. Pocock. See Pocock, “The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject,” American Historical Review 87 (1982): 311–36; and “British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1975): 601–21. His plea has been answered in studies too numerous to mention, but for a view of the state of the field, see A. Grant and K. Stringer, eds., Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1996); R. Asch, ed., Three Nations—A Common History? England, Scotland, Ireland and British History c. 1600–1920 (Bochum, Germany, 1994); S. Ellis and S...