The character of the population introduced into a country where the natives are treated as outlaws and wild beasts by the government, is not hard to guess. It is not at all likely that it is going to consist of model farmers, expert artisans, pious, educated, peaceful men and women; that kind of people usually remain at home. The adventurer, the ne’er-do-well, the poor, the desperate, the homeless; those are the kind willing to face the hazards of war and fortune in a land where the natives are hard fighters and haters of the government, even though exhausted by war.
The Rev. Andrew Stewart, Presbyterian pastor of Donaghadee from 1645 to 1671, who was born and raised in Ulster, leaves this record of Professor Fiske’s selected yeomanry and artisans:
“From Scotland came many, and from England not a few; yet all of them generally the scum of both nations, who for debt, or breaking, or fleeing from justice, or seeking shelter, came hither, hoping to be without fear of man’s justice in a land where there was nothing, or but little as yet, of the fear of God.”
Such were the selected yeomanry; selected evidently by the king’s writ, by the beggarly planters who received the stolen lands from a beggarly king, and by the London guides whose gold went into the king’s pocket.
The reverend gentleman gives us a further hint of the people who came thus running from the sheriff and the heavy hand of the law. He says: “In a few years there flocked such a multitude of people from Scotland that the Counties of Down, Antrim, Londonderry, etc., were in a good measure planted; yet most of the people made up a body—and it is strange—of different names, nations, dialects, tempers, and breeding, all void of Godliness, who seemed rather to flee God in this enterprise, than to follow their mercy; albeit at first it must be remembered that they cared little for any church.”
People of many nations and dialects coming out of Scotland needs an explanation. Mr. Motley, in his history of the Dutch Republic, throws a great light on this subject. He says in effect that the religious wars of Protestant and Catholic, and the persecutions growing out of them of the ever-increasing sectaries, drove shoals of artisans from Germany, Holland, and France to England. Elizabeth of England had troubles of her own; and while she quarreled with the Pope and disputed his headship, she was jealously insistent of her own leadership of her state church and had no use for the pugnacious sectaries from across the Channel. In time, owing to the English jealousy of foreigners and rival manufacturers and the Queen’s abhorrence of rebels against divinely selected kings, Elizabeth shut down on the refugees and refused them asylum. In those days it was a much graver offense to insult the majesty of earth than heaven. Scotland, then in the throes of religious squabbles and the game of church plundering and under the practical guidance of the amiable John Knox, gave them a welcome as kindred spirits. When other days came, when Mary’s head had rolled from the block at Fotheringay, when her wretched son was enthroned, the foreign element found Scotland a poor land to live in. The settlement of Ulster gave them their chance, and they flocked there with Scotchmen and Englishmen, to settle down and intermarry and become—as all before them had become at that Irish crucible—Irish.
The forms of religious dissent driven out of Europe to Great Britain, like Presbyterianism, had a common basis of agreement in their common Calvinism, and the foreigners naturally drifted into that form of ecclesiastical organization. Few went into the Anglican State Church, and many of that faith drifted away from it to Catholicity and Presbyterianism; and it was a special subject of reproach later that the state-beneficed clergy caused such a state of affairs by their indifference and greed.
But it remains for American historians to find the terms race and religion synonymous, and to advise an astonished world that when an Irishman, Frenchman, Englishman, Dutchman, or Walloon, adopts Presbyterianism as his religious faith, he is at once transformed into that hyphenated hybrid, a Scotch-Irishman.
This is one of the marvels of this inventive age.
Before Professor Fiske—for whose talent and industry I have a very great respect—gives us his promised views on the Scotch-Irishman in his forthcoming work, The Dutch and Quaker Settlements in America, let me propound a question or two to him.