During the eighteenth century, there were four primary groups who immigrated to North America. The second largest was the Germans which we went over last week, followed by the Scots, who largely came over as indentured servants, and French Huguenots, Protestant French fleeing persecution in France, both of whom settled in more coastal areas and quickly integrated into the broader colonial society. However, the largest group by far were the Scotch-Irish, some of the craziest mother fuckers to cross the Atlantic.
The people who later became known as the Scotch-Irish originally came from the borderlands region between England and Scotland, a contested area between the two kingdoms for most of the Middle Ages. As a result of the constantly shifting nature of the border, the people living there took on a decidedly fuck it and we don’t take shit kind of attitude. Living in tight knit self-sufficient communities, they gained a reputation for both their fighting prowess and independent streak, often giving both countries the middle finger. Thanks to their tendencies to hire out as mercenaries to the highest bidder and conduct raids on not just their neighbors but also each other, they were often called Border Reavers. Beginning in the sixteenth century, these Border Reavers followed the majority of Scotland in converting from Catholicism to Presbyterianism, a Protestant sect which not only had individual churches run by elected councils, but also had the interesting belief that God had already chosen who would go to heaven and hell before the world was even created, so it didn’t really matter what people did while alive. Given this basically gave the Border Reavers a free pass to do whatever the hell they wanted, they took to their new religion with a significant amount of zealotry.
Now when England and Scotland became ruled by a single king, James I, in the early seventeenth century, the Border Reavers became a bit of a problem given there was no longer the need to have a bunch of crazy asshats living on a suddenly pretty pointless border. However, luckily James I was also king of Ireland, another area which gave him constant headaches. Eager to better control the Irish, James had disposed many of the Irish chieftains in Ulster and given their lands to random English and Scottish flunkies, though most had little interest in going to a country full of Catholics who didn’t want them there. To solve both problems, James moved some 100,000 of the Border Reavers to Ulster, a feat he accomplished by hiring some as mercenaries to fight in Ireland and then just leaving them there and convincing others to move on threat of seriously fucking things up if they didn’t. Over the preceding generations the Border Reavers firmly established themselves in Ulster, mostly through violence and stubbornness, and became known as the Scotch-Irish.
Now unfortunately for the Scotch-Irish, things weren’t always all that great for them in Ulster. At the time Ireland was under a set of laws which stripped rights from anyone who wasn’t Anglican, which not only screwed over the native Catholics, but also the Presbyterian Scotch-Irish. Furthermore, the absentee lords of the lands they lived on, far off in England and Scotland, didn’t give two fucks about them, jacking up rents whenever they could so they could drink fine wines and afford fancy mistresses and foppish hats or whatever. As a result, by the start of the eighteenth century many of the Scotch-Irish were looking to move on. Luckily, around this same time the colonies of New England had a little problem in that Queen Anne’s War had thoroughly depopulated their frontier, leaving them vulnerable to attacks by the French and their native allies. To solve this, they sent representatives to Ulster specifically to recruit Scotch-Irish to immigrate, figuring their Protestant zealotry and famed fighting prowess was just what they needed.
The first mass migration of Scotch-Irish to North America took place in 1717, with several thousands immigrating to the New England frontier and excitedly writing home about the seemingly endless supply of cheap land. As a side note, they also brought with them the potato, which though originally from South America, had never been grown in North America before. Anyways, unfortunately it quickly became obvious that the New England colonists viewed the Scotch-Irish as at best second class citizens, so as a result the next wave to Scotch-Irish immigrants shifted south to Pennsylvania, a colony famous for not really giving a shit who moved there. Unlike many other immigrant groups, few of the Scotch-Irish crossed the Atlantic as indentured servants, but lacking money when they arrived, they were largely forced to in the eastern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, the so-called frontier of European civilization. Building small farms, churches, and grist mills, they formed tight-knit communities made up of small networks of related families who lived together, worshipped together, intermarried, and avoided outsiders. Though tolerated, they were generally looked down upon by the descendants of the earlier English colonists.
Between 1717 and 1775, some 250,000 Scotch-Irish crossed the Atlantic, the biggest wave being in the 1740s when a drought and famine struck Ulster. The influx of new migrants combined with the Scotch-Irish propensity for having a ridiculous number of children, many of whom were beginning to come of age, created a shortage of land in Pennsylvania. As a result, the Scotch-Irish began pushing their way south along the Appalachian foothills, settling in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, and even pushing their way across the mountains into what is today Tennessee and Kentucky. As they moved south they also became more involved in the deer hide trade, crossing the mountains to hunt in lands claimed by the Iroquois, Shawnee, and Cherokee, who depended on the deer hide trade to access European trade goods. As one can imagine, this led to all sorts of conflict and violence, though the two groups often traded with each other as well.
By the time of the American Revolution, some 10 percent of the population of the Thirteen Colonies were Scotch-Irish. Considered backwards by those belonging to the long-established colonial society, they were famed for their restless nature, constantly pushing deeper into the frontier, loyalty to kin, extreme distrust of government authority, and propensity to not only bear arms, but also use them, traits that had a profound effect on the future nation which became known as the United States of America.
