scotch-irish immigrants-- 4/14/25

• 0 COMMENTS

Today's selection -- from Hard Neighbors by Colin Calloway. During the 1700s, hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants came to America, many of Scottish descent, and helped transform the new country. This was part of a mass migration to the new world, of which the author writes, “Nothing in history is comparable to this continuous movement of mankind except perhaps that which followed the fall of the Roman Empire”:

“During 1745 and 1746, 529 Irish immigrants were bound to masters in Philadelphia. Among them, in October 1745, Robert Black, the seven-year-old son of widow Elizabeth Black ‘(who was likewise present and expressed her consent)’ bound himself as a servant to Adam Hodge, a baker in Philadelphia County, for thirteen years and five months ‘in consideration of his being educated and maintained, and his being taught to read and write.’ At the expiration of his term, Robert was ‘to have one suit of new apparel besides his old ones.’ In the spring of 1746, William Rankin assigned a steady stream of servants newly arrived from Ireland to various people. And in September of that year, as recorded, ‘Daniel McKendry on consideration of £14: paid [to] Robert Blair for his passage from Ireland indents himself servant to Thomas McMollin of Chester County, weaver, for five years and a half from this date, to be taught the trade of a weaver, and to have customary dues.’ A good number of servants, perhaps as many as one-fifth, were bound to Irish or Scotch-Irish masters. There tended to be fewer indentured servants and more tradesmen in the new wave of migration from Ulster after the American Revolution, allowing them greater freedom of movement on arrival.

“In all, approximately 400,000 emigrants from Ireland settled in North America between the late 1600s and the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. Perhaps two-thirds of them were Presbyterians, and the vast majority of the Presbyterians and perhaps half of the Catholics and many of the Anglicans and other Protestants came from Ulster. Many of the others came from counties bordering on Ulster. Ulster Scots stood out from Catholic Irish emigrants, from whom they kept their distance. But distinctive Scotch-Irish communities also evolved because Ulster women emigrated as well, something not replicated elsewhere in Ireland, except Dublin, until the nineteenth century.

“By the time of the first United States census in 1790, Irish-born Americans and their descendants constituted one-eighth of the white population in New York, a quarter in Pennsylvania, more than a quarter in Georgia and South Carolina, between a quarter and a third in Kentucky and Tennessee, and one-sixth in Maryland and Virginia. The numbers of immigrants were relatively small compared with the mass migrations of Irish people in the nineteenth century, perhaps, but were enormous in proportion to contemporary population levels in Ulster, Ireland, and America. In the late 1750s, there were probably fewer than half a million Presbyterians in Ulster, and only about 2.4 million people in the whole of Ireland; the population of Britain's North American mainland colonies was about 1.5 million, white and Black. As late as 1790, Ireland's population was only about 4 million, and the United States had 3.23 million white inhabitants. In other words, migration from Ulster had dramatic consequences in Ireland and America. Early Irish migrants and their offspring became a significant presence in many seaports and inland towns, and those who moved on dominated frontier settlement. All played important roles in the social conflicts, economic developments, religious revivals, and political upheavals that created and shaped the new American nation.

“Ulster emigration did not end with the American Revolution; in fact, it continued at high or higher levels in the three decades after the Revolution. More Ulster Presbyterians (and other Irish immigrants) migrated to the United States in the half-century or so after the Revolution than had left Ireland for Britain's North American colonies in the one hundred years before 1776. Between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the onset of the Great Famine thirty years later, Irish emigration to America numbered between 800,000 and 1,000,000, about twice the total for the preceding two hundred years.

“However, the character and composition of the emigration was changing significantly. In the prolonged postwar economic crisis, the emigration impulse spread far beyond Ulster to all parts of Ireland, and the emigrants became increasingly Catholic and poor. Ulster Protestants were still the majority in the mid-1820s and comprised about 50 percent from 1827 to 1835, but by the early 1840s most emigrants were poor Catholics from southern Ireland. The Great Famine, generally set between 1845 and 1852, sent emigration soaring. Between 1845 and 1870, more than 3 million people left Ireland, most for the United States. By 1911, Ireland's population was only 4.4 million, almost half what it had been before the famines (8.2 million).

“The migration of the people who became the Scotch-Irish in North America was part of broader Irish historical experience of migration and diaspora, and of a momentous shift of human population that changed the world on both sides of the Atlantic. Writing at a time (in the 1830s) when ‘the ultimate results of American migration to the west are still hidden in the future,' Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw that it would spread across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific: 

“So the European quits his hovel to go and dwell on the transatlantic coast, while the American who was born there moves off in turn into the central solitudes of America. This double movement of immigration never halts; it starts from the depths of Europe, continues across the great ocean, and then goes on through the solitudes of the New World .... Nothing in history is comparable to this continuous movement of mankind except perhaps that which followed the fall of the Roman Empire. 

“Tocqueville attributed the driving force of this movement to the energy and industry of ‘the English race’ who became Anglo-Americans.  The people and the process he described, however, were largely Scotch-Irish. 

“Like their Delaware neighbors who had built a new world on the back of the giant turtle after journeying out of darkness, the people who became the Scotch-Irish built their new world and their sense of themselves through migration and mobility. Propelled across the Irish Sea and then the Atlantic Ocean, they pushed on into the interior of America, adding new migration experiences to their foundational myths. Like many Indian peoples, they believed the Creator had found the best place for his people. And if, as their history suggested they would, they had to fight for their place in the promised land, their stern Calvinist Old Testament religion armed them with a theology for dealing with the heathens they found there: ‘When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you ... then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them’ (Deuteronomy 7:1-2). Dispossessing the Indigenous inhabitants, they would, eventually, claim for themselves the role of original people in the land they occupied.”

author:	Colin Calloway
title:	Hard Neighbors: The Scotch-Irish Invasion of Native America and the Making of an American Identity
publisher:	Oxford University Press
pages:	44-47