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.