For one hundred years the Scotch multiplied in Ulster and had no dealings with the remnants of the Irish, whom they crowded into the barren hills and whom they treated like savages. They retained their purity of race, and although when they came to America they called themselves Irish and were known as Irish wherever they settled, yet they had no Irish blood except that which entered into their composition through the Irish migration to Scotia fifteen hundred years before.
Yet, though they despised the Irish, they could not escape the unhappy fate of Ireland. The first blow came in 1698, nearly one hundred years after their settlement. English manufacturers complained of Irish competition, and the Irish Parliament, a tool of the British crown, passed an act totally forbidding the exportation of Irish woollens, and another act forbidding the exportation of Irish wool to any country save England. Their slowly growing linen industry was likewise discriminated against in later years. Presbyterian Ulster had been the industrial centre of Ireland, and these acts nearly destroyed her industry. Next Queen Anne’s Parliament adopted penal laws directed against Roman Catholics and Presbyterians, and the Test Act, which compelled public officials to take the communion of the Established Church, deprived the entire Scotch population of self-government. Nevertheless they were compelled to pay tithes to support the Established Church to which they were opposed. Lastly, the hundred-year leases of the tenants began to run out, and the landlords offered renewals to the highest bidders on short leases. Here the poverty-stricken Irish gained an unhappy revenge on the Scotch who had displaced them of their ancestral lands, for their low standard of living enabled them to offer rack-rents far above what the Scotch could afford. No longer did religion, race pride, or gratitude have a part in holding Ulster to Protestant supremacy. The greed of absentee landlords began to have full sway, and in the resulting struggle for livelihood, hopeless poverty was fitter to survive than ambitious thrift.
The Scotch tenants, their hearts bitter against England and aristocracy, now sought a country where they might have free land and self-government. In 1718 it is stated that 4200 of them left for America. After the famine of 1740 there were 12,000 who left annually. Altogether, in the half century just preceding the American Revolution, 200,000[9] persons, or one-third of the Protestant population of Ulster, are said to have emigrated, and the majority came to America. This was by far the largest contribution of any race to the population of America during the eighteenth century, and the injustice they suffered at the hands of England made them among the most determined and effective recruits to the armies that won our independence.
Before the Scotch-Irish moved to America the Atlantic coast line had been well occupied. Consequently, in order to obtain land for themselves, they were forced to go to the interior and to become frontiersmen. They found in Massachusetts a state church to which they must conform in order to be admitted to citizenship. But what they had left Ireland to escape they would not consent in a new country to do. The Puritans were willing that they should occupy the frontier as a buffer against the Indians, and so they took up lands in New Hampshire, Vermont, Western Massachusetts, and Maine. Only a few congregations, however, settled in New England—the bulk of the immigrants entered by way of Philadelphia and Baltimore and went to the interior of Pennsylvania surrounding and south of Harrisburg. They spread through the Shenandoah valley and in the foothill regions of Virginia and North and South Carolina. Gradually, they pushed farther west, across the mountains into Western Pennsylvania about Pittsburg, and into Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. In all of these regions they fought the Indians, protected the older inhabitants from inroads, and developed those pioneer qualities which for one hundred years have characterized the “winning of the West.”
Anglo-Saxon Mountaineers, Berea College, Kentucky
The Scotch-Irish occupied a peculiar place in the new world. More than any other race they served as the amalgam to produce, out of divergent races, a new race, the American. The Puritans of New England, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, the Cavaliers of Virginia, were as radically different as peoples of different races, and they were separated from each other in their own exclusive communities. The Germans were localized in Pennsylvania and Maryland, the Dutch in New York, but the Scotch-Irish “alone of the various races in America were present in sufficient numbers in all of the colonies to make their influence count; and they alone of all the races had one uniform religion; had experienced together the persecutions by state and church which had deprived them at home of their civil and religious liberties; and were the common heirs to those principles of freedom and democracy which had been developed in Scotland as nowhere else. At the time of the American Revolution there were ... in all above five hundred settlements scattered over practically all the American colonies.”[10] Trained as they were in the representative democracy of the Scottish kirk, thrown on their own resources in the wilderness, mingling with the pioneers of many other races, they took the lead in developing that Western type which in politics and industry became ultimately the American type; yet they retained their original character, and the American to-day is more at home in Glasgow than in London.