Scotch-Irish Americans (sometimes Scots-Irish) are American descendants of primarily Ulster Scots people, who emigrated from the Ulster province of Ireland to the United States between the 18th and 19th centuries, with their ancestors having originally migrated to Ulster, mainly from the historically conflict‑ridden counties of the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England along the Anglo-Scottish border in the 17th century.David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed, Oxford, 1989, p. 618.Scholarly estimates vary, but here are a few: "more than a quarter-million", Fischer, David Hackett, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America Oxford University Press, USA (March 14, 1989), p. 606; "200,000", Rouse, Parke Jr., The Great Wagon Road, Dietz Press, 2004, p. 32; "...250,000 people left for America between 1717 and 1800...20,000 were Anglo-Irish, 20,000 were Gaelic Irish, and the remainder Ulster-Scots or Scotch-Irish...", Blethen, H.T. & Wood, C.W., From Ulster to Carolina, North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 2005, p. 22; "more than 100,000", Griffin, Patrick, The People with No Name, Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 1; "200,000", Leyburn, James G., The Scotch-Irish: A Social History, University of North Carolina Press, 1962, p. 180; "225,000", Hansen, Marcus L., The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860, Cambridge, Mass, 1940, p. 41; "250,000", Dunaway, Wayland F. The Scotch-Irish of Colonial Pennsylvania, Genealogical Publishing Co (1944), p. 41; "300,000", Barck, O.T. & Lefler, H.T., Colonial America, New York (1958), p. 285.
In the 2017 American Community Survey, 5.39 million (1.7% of the population) reported Scottish ancestry, an additional 3 million (0.9% of the population) identified more specifically with Scotch-Irish ancestry, and many people who claim "American ancestry" may actually be of Scotch-Irish ancestry.2017 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates - United States Census Bureau
The term Scotch-Irish is used primarily in the United States,Leyburn 1962, p. 327. with people in Great Britain or Ireland who are of a similar ancestry identifying as Ulster Scots people. Many left for North America, but over 100,000 Scottish Presbyterians still lived in Ulster in 1800.John Sherry, "Scottish Presbyterian networks in Ulster and the Irish House of Commons, 1692–1714." Parliaments, Estates and Representation 33.2 (2013): 120−139 at p. 121. With the enforcement of Queen Anne's 1704 Popery Act, which caused further discrimination against all who did not participate in the established church, considerable numbers of Ulster-Scots migrated to the colonies in British America throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
Terminology The term is first known to have been used for Scottish Catholics in Ireland. In a letter of April 14, 1573, in reference to descendants of "gallowglass" mercenaries from Scotland who had settled in Ireland, Elizabeth I of England wrote:
We are given to understand that a nobleman named Sorley Boy MacDonnell and others, who be of the Scotch-Irish race ...Calendar of Patent and Close Rolls of Chancery, as cited in Leyburn, op. cit., 329.
This term continued in usage for over a centuryH. Dalrymple, Decisions of the Court of Sessions from 1698 to 1718, ed. by Bell and Bradfute (Edinburgh, Scotland, 1792), 1:73/29. See Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, s.v. toung. before the earliest known American reference appeared in a Maryland affidavit in 1689–90."William Pattent was at worke at James Minders and one night as I was at worke Mr Matt: Scarbrough came into the house of sd Minders and sett down by me as I was at work, the sd Minder askt him if he came afoot, he made answer again and sd he did, saying that man, meaning me, calling me Rogue makes me goe afoot, also makes it his business to goe from house to house to ruinate me, my Wife and Children for ever. I made answer is it I Mr. Scarbrough(?) and he replyed and said ay you, you Rogue, for which doing ile whip you and make my Wife whipp to whipp you, and I answered if ever I have abused (you) at any time, or to any bodies hearing, I will give you full satisfaction to your own Content. (At which Scarbrough said) You Scotch Irish dogg it was you, with that he gave me a blow on the face saying it was no more sin to kill me then to kill a dogg, or any Scotch Irish dogg, giving me another blow in the face. now saying goe to yr god that Rogue and have a warrant for me and I will answer it." Wm. Patent
Scotch-Irish, according to James Leyburn, "is an Americanism, generally unknown in Scotland and Ireland, and rarely used by British historians".Leyburn p xi. It became common in the United States after 1850.Leyburn p. 331. The term is somewhat ambiguous because some of the Scotch-Irish have little or no Scottish or Irish ancestry at all: numerous dissenter families, such as the Grahams, were transplanted from northern England to Ulster, specifically from Cumberland and Northumberland. This allowed the Crown to repopulate their English lands with followers of Anglicanism, who were considered to have "good and honest conversation". Smaller numbers of migrants also came from Wales, the Isle of Man, and the southeast of England, and others were Protestant religious refugees from Flanders, the German Palatinate, and France (such as the French Huguenot ancestors of Davy Crockett). What united these different national groups was a base of Calvinist religious beliefs, and their separation from the established church (the Church of England and Church of Ireland in this case). That said, the large ethnic Scottish element in the Plantation of Ulster gave the settlements a "Scottish character" rather than an Irish one.
Upon arrival in North America, these migrants at first usually identified simply as Irish, without the qualifier Scotch. It was not until a century later, following the surge in Irish immigration after the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, that the descendants of the earlier arrivals began to commonly call themselves "Scotch-Irish" to distinguish themselves from the newer, poor, predominantly Catholic immigrants.Patrick Fitzgerald, "The Scotch-Irish & the Eighteenth-Century Irish Diaspora". History Ireland 7.3 (1999): 37–41. At first, the two groups had little interaction in America, as the Scotch-Irish had become settled many decades earlier, primarily in the backcountry of the Appalachian region. The new wave of Catholic Irish settled primarily in port cities such as Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, Memphis and New Orleans, where large immigrant communities formed and there were an increasing number of jobs. Many of the new Irish migrants also went to the interior in the 19th century, attracted to jobs on large-scale infrastructure projects such as canals and railroads.Leyburn 1962, pp. 327–334.
The usage Scots-Irish developed in the late 19th century. Two early citations include: 1) "a grave, elderly man of the race known in America as 'Scots-Irish (1870); and 2) "Dr. Cochran was of stately presence, of fair and florid complexion, features which testified his Scots-Irish descent" (1884).See Magazine of American History 1884 p 258
History of the term Scotch-Irish
Scotch was the usual adjective for things pertaining to Scotland, including people, until the 19th century, when it was eclipsed by Scottish. It survives in certain set phrases, such as Scotch whisky and Scotch broth, and in the term Scotch-Irish. Although described by Merriam-Webster dictionaries as having first appeared in 1744, the term is undoubtedly older. An affidavit of William Patent, dated March 15, 1689, in a case against a Mr. Matthew Scarbrough in Somerset County, Maryland, quotes Mr. Patent as saying he was told by Scarbrough that "it was no more sin to kill me then to kill a dogg, or any Scotch Irish dogg".
Leyburn cites the following as early American uses of the term before 1744.Leyburn 1962, p. 330. The earliest is a report in June 1695, by Sir Thomas Laurence, Secretary of Maryland, that "In the two counties of Dorchester and Somerset, where the Scotch-Irish are numerous, they clothe themselves by their linen and woolen manufactures." In September 1723, Rev. George Ross, Rector of Immanuel Church in New Castle, Delaware, wrote in reference to their anti-Church of England stance that, "They call themselves Scotch-Irish ... and the bitterest railers against the church that ever trod upon American ground." Another Church of England clergyman from Lewes, Delaware, commented in 1723 that "great numbers of Irish (who usually call themselves Scotch-Irish) have transplanted themselves and their families from the north of Ireland".
The Oxford English Dictionary says the first use of the term Scotch-Irish came in Pennsylvania in 1744: 1744 W. MARSHE Jrnl. 21 June in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. (1801) 1st Ser. VII. 177: "The inhabitants [of Lancaster, Pennsylvania] are chiefly High-Dutch, Scotch-Irish, some few English families, and unbelieving Israelites." Its citations include examples after that into the late 19th century.
In Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, historian David Hackett Fischer asserts: Some historians describe these immigrants as "Ulster Irish" or "Northern Irish". It is true that many sailed from the province of Ulster ... part of much larger flow which drew from the lowlands of Scotland, the north of England, and every side of the Irish Sea. Many scholars call these people Scotch-Irish. That expression is an Americanism, rarely used in Britain and much resented by the people to whom it was attached. "We're no Eerish bot Scoatch," one of them was heard to say in Pennsylvania.Fischer, p. 618.
Fischer prefers to speak of "borderers" (referring to the historically war-torn England-Scotland border) as the population ancestral to the "backcountry" "cultural stream" (one of the four major and persistent cultural streams from Ireland and Britain which he identifies in American history). He notes the borderers had substantial English and Scandinavian roots. He describes them as being quite different from Gaelic-speaking groups such as the Scottish Highlanders or Irish (that is, Gaelic-speaking and predominantly Roman Catholic).
Many have claimed that such a distinction should not be used, and that those called Scotch-Irish are simply Irish, despite having previously come from Scotland or England. Other Irish limit the term Irish to those of native Gaelic stock, and prefer to describe the Ulster Protestants as British (a description many Ulster Protestants have preferred themselves to Irish, at least since the Irish Free State broke free from the United Kingdom, although Ulstermen has been adopted in order to maintain a distinction from the native Irish Gaels while retaining a claim to the North of Ireland).James G. Leyburn (1962). . In The Scotch-Irish: A Social History. University of North Carolina Press. However, as one scholar observed in 1944, "in this country [the US], where they have been called Scotch-Irish for over two hundred years, it would be absurd to give them a name by which they are not known here. ... Here their name is Scotch-Irish; let us call them by it."Wayland F. Dunaway, The Scotch-Irish of Colonial America, 1944, University of North Carolina Press
Migration From 1710 to 1775, over 200,000 people settled from Ulster to the original thirteen American colonies. The largest numbers went to Pennsylvania. From that base some went south into Virginia, the Carolinas and across the South, with a large concentration in the Appalachian region. Others headed west to western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and the Midwest.