Making America, Part 2

The restlessness of the Scotch-Irish and the making of the American persona

Daniel Boone escorting settlers through the Cumberland Gap by George Caleb Bingham

The term “Scotch-Irish” was barely known before Americans began using it in the mid-nineteenth century. That was after a tidal wave of millions of Irish immigrants arrived in East Coast seaports and settled in East Coast cities, sparking a nativist backlash against them. Before that surge of migration, the “Scotch-Irish” were generally just called “Irish.” The new appellation served to distinguish the earlier arrivals from the later, much-despised ones.

The Scotch-Irish themselves, however, barely thought of themselves as Scottish at all. Before shipping off to America in the seventeenth century, many of them had never set their eyes on Scotland. Their families had been living in Ireland for generations. When they pined for home, it was for Irish hills and glens and creeks and villages, not Scottish ones.

They were Irishmen. But they were not the Irish of New York City or South Boston, who had fled the potato famine to find work as day laborers, digging sewers, paving streets, and sewing garments for poverty wages. To begin with, they weren’t Catholic. They were, at first, Presbyterians (many later became Methodists and Baptists). They weren’t necessarily destitute farmers. In Ulster, the Northern Irish province that had once been their home, many had been employed in wool and linen manufacturing. And lastly, their families had, indeed, once lived in Scotland, even if that country was now only a mythical ancestral land that they barely thought of in their day-to-day lives.

Within a generation or two of their arrival, the Scotch-Irish would no longer think of themselves as “Irish,” either. Instead, they were Pennsylvanians, Virginians, or North Carolinians. After they crossed the Alleghenies, some of them were Kentuckians or Tennesseans, though by that time, the United States had achieved its independence from England, so more likely they would have just called themselves Americans.

Whatever one chooses to call them, the very itinerancy that made them so hard to pin down to a simple geographical descriptor is also what accounted for their indelible impact on American political culture. To the extent that the New World was about shedding both the privileges and burdens of ancient family bloodlines and merging into a common national identity as individuals in pursuit of a better life, the Scotch-Irish experience was the physical expression of the very idea of America.

The ancestors of the Scotch-Irish colonists were, until the seventeenth century, Scottish Lowlanders. Especially near the border of England, Scotland in those days was a particularly brutal land, even by early modern European standards. For centuries, the Scottish and English crowns invaded each other’s territories, torching villages in the process. When the two sides weren’t formally at war, they were raiding one another for sport and profit. Scottish farmers were conscripted as soldiers in these battles, so basically every man in that region of the country had combat experience.

Since the twelfth century, Scotland had been a feudal country, meaning that local sovereignty belonged to the lords, and it was the inherent prerogative of the nobility to carry out their private disputes with one another through force of arms. In many other, larger European countries, over the centuries, the crown came to obtain a monopoly on the means of conducting warfare, which was the a precondition for national pacification and a prelude to the emergence of the nation-state. In Scotland, the king never achieved such a decisive military advantage over the other lords to set him on this path. The king was just another nobleman, denied even the right to tax.

Out of this perpetual state of warfare emerged conditions of lawlessness, which in turn bore a culture of violence and belligerence from the king on down to the peasant. The absence of centralized government encouraged the emergence of criminal gangs that lived off of pillage and cattle theft. For both offensive and defensive purposes, men formed into alliances based on the only ties that mattered — those of blood. Families became clans, which went to war with each other in lengthy blood feuds. The insecurity of life and property further meant that there was little incentive even for those who could afford it to build handsome homes filled with imported luxury products. There was thus little interest in international trade, and, in turn, no emergent mercantile class in Scotland with a material interest in peace and rule of law.

The violence kept the Scottish Lowland farmer in a state of permanent abject poverty. Peasants, who were not only penniless but expected their homes to eventually be torched by raiders or an invading army, adopted crude construction methods that would allow them to rebuild a residence within a few hours. The typical Scottish hovel was built with stacked stones covered in dirt, with straw or moss plugging the gaps. The “chimney” was a hole in the roof. The “beds” were piles of straw or heather. The floor was earth, and cattle slept in the same room as the family. Vermin were everywhere. Disease was constant. And on top of all that, the soil in Scotland was poor and agricultural technology primitive.

These were the miserable conditions of life in Scotland at the turn of the seventeenth century when Queen Elizabeth and her successor, James I, attempted to solve the interminable headache and financial drain that was Ireland by colonizing it. Both crown policy and private enterprise turned to the Scottish Lowlanders to populate the region of Ireland that had caused the biggest problems for England: the northern province of Ulster. Separated by just twenty miles of sea from Scotland and endowed with more fertile soils, it was an easy sell to Scottish peasants and lords alike. They flocked there in droves, displacing the native Irish — which was, for England, the entire point of the policy.

Several decades of economic success by the colonists attracted settlers from the North of England to join the Scottish transplants. But those decades were followed by a longer period of hardship. The displaced Irish natives rebelled against the colonizers in a war that lasted more than a decade, initiating centuries of further conflict. That was followed by a months-long siege of Londonderry by the deposed Catholic King of England, James I, and his allied French army.

Even after peace returned, life continued to get worse. The Ulster Scots became victims of their own success. The improvements they made to their land enabled their landlords to double and even triple their rents, while English wool manufacturers, threatened by competition from Ulster, pressured the English government to restrict Irish trade to the colonies. Then, on top of that, England passed an act compelling Irish Presbyterians to take an Anglican sacrament to hold public office or perform public services, including officiating Presbyterian marriages.

So the eighteenth century saw a massive wave of migration — or, more accurately, three big waves — from Ulster to the New World. The migrants embarked primarily for the colony of Pennsylvania, where the Quakers, unlike the New England Puritans, greeted them with a spirit of religious tolerance, and where there was still cheap land with fertile soil. But the sober, pacifist Quakers soon grew weary of their vulgar, hard-drinking, pugnacious new co-colonists, and encouraged them to seek out lands in the Pennsylvania back country far from Philadelphia. This suited the Scotch-Irish, who had come to farm, not to labor in the city. As each successive wave arrived — Germans in addition to Ulstermen — claiming plots in the nearest wildernesses, migrants pushed further westward, deeper and deeper into the back country. There they more often squatted their new lands than purchased them legally. In so doing, they trammeled over the rights of already-encroached-upon Indians, with whom they went to war, endlessly frustrating the Quakers’ policy of peace and fair relations with the tribes.

When the Lowlanders had arrived in Ulster from Scotland more than a hundred years before, they had left feudal relations behind. In doing so, they had taken, without fanfare, a step toward independence from the shackles of ancient bloodlines as the determinant of one’s social station. With their move to the American colonies they took another. In forging settlements out of wildernesses with only the crudest of tools, shielding themselves from the elements in crude tents while they built their log cabins and cleared their densely forested lands, the Ulster pioneers found themselves equally humbled by the mammoth physical tasks before them. Their common toil with nature was a great social leveler — in that primitive reality, the class distinctions of the Old World fell away. The social esteem that had once attached to family lineage was replaced, little by little, by the prestige of individual accomplishment and the relative wealth so derived. Over the course of years, as frontier communities cohered into settled societies, some of the social rank ordering of civilized life by property, education and background would reappear. But pushing against that tendency were the shiploads of new arrivals pushing ever further into the back country.

By the eve of the Revolutionary War, the Scotch-Irish had pushed beyond Pennsylvania into Virginia and the Piedmont of North Carolina and then into South Carolina. Later, they would cross the Alleghenies into Tennessee and Kentucky, and, eventually, populate the Texas Hill Country and the California gold rush camps and boom towns. They brought with them to these new frontiers their old folkways of prolific violence, clan organization, and retributive and often summary justice. Their long historical experience with war would be put to use in two ways in the making of the United States of America. First, they were instrumental and possibly decisive in the patriots’ defeat of the British army. Second, they became the advance guard of American expansion onto Indian lands. In both they would become legendary for their prowess in guerrilla warfare and their readiness to fight. In the latter, they would also become notorious for their wanton brutality.

Through the nineteenth century, the Scotch-Irish pioneers were the tip of the spear of Manifest Destiny. Their frontier ways, forged in Scotland, Ulster and the Appalachian backcountry, became part of the culture and ideology of westward expansion. That included their self-reliance, their warrior ethos, their rough and improvised justice, their ruthlessness toward the Indians, their disdain for unearned privilege, and their reflexive contempt for sovereign authority. But west of the Alleghenies, the Scotch-Irish became so intermingled with other European ethnicities that they barely constituted a group anymore. Likewise, their culture was no longer Scottish, Irish, or even Appalachian. It had become, simply, American.