The Plantation of Ulster and the Scots-Irish: From Ulster to the American Frontier

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Numbers of settlers and emigrants are estimates. Popular accounts sometimes attribute many American traits to the Scots-Irish with little evidence, and the history of the Plantation is politically sensitive. This card aims to state what is well supported.

Settlement in Down and Antrim

established Even before the official Plantation, Scots had long crossed between south-west Scotland and the north of Ireland. In 1606 two Ayrshire lairds, Hugh Montgomery and James Hamilton, acquired land in Down from the Gaelic lord Conn O'Neill and brought over Scottish tenants, establishing settlements that thrived.

The Plantation

established After the Gaelic earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell fled to the Continent in 1607, the Crown confiscated large areas of Ulster and, from 1609, granted them to English and Scottish "undertakers", who were to bring in Protestant settlers and build fortified houses. The City of London was granted Derry, renamed Londonderry. Scots, mostly from the Lowlands and the south-west, came in large numbers, bringing Presbyterianism and Scots speech, which survives as Ulster Scots.

Dispossession and conflict

established Many native Irish were moved to poorer land or remained as tenants on land they had once controlled. Resentment fed the rising of 1641, in which many Protestant settlers were killed, and the cycle of conflict continued through the seventeenth century and beyond. The Plantation is a root of the divisions in Northern Ireland today.

Across the Atlantic

established From 1717 onward, high rents, poor harvests and discrimination against Presbyterians under the Penal Laws drove many Ulster Scots to emigrate to America. They landed mostly at Philadelphia and moved west and south along the Great Wagon Road into the Shenandoah Valley, the Carolinas and the Appalachian backcountry. In America they came to be called "Scotch-Irish".

shared The name is often said to have been coined to distinguish them from Catholic Irish immigrants. The term was in use before the Revolution: a Virginia Gazette advertisement of 22 October 1772, cited by Fischer, described a runaway slave named Jack who could "speak the Scotch-Irish dialect". But in the eighteenth century the emigrants were just as often called simply "Irish", and the insistence on "Scotch-Irish" as a mark of difference from Catholic Irish grew mainly with the mass Catholic Irish immigration of the nineteenth century. Fischer notes that the term is an Americanism, rarely used in Britain and resented by some of those it described: one settler in Pennsylvania protested, "We're no Eerish bot Scoatch."

shared The anthropologist Celeste Ray, in her chapters of Transatlantic Scots (2005), gives a different emphasis. She argues that the name was first used to separate Patriot Ulster Scots from the mostly Loyalist Highland Scots, whose reputation for Loyalism outlived the Revolution, and only later to separate Protestant Ulster emigrants from the Catholic "Famine Irish" of the 1840s. In British North America, she notes, Ulster Scots were simply called Irish. Fischer's 1772 example shows the term was current before the Revolution, so the two accounts are best read together: an older label that gained new uses as American politics and immigration changed. Ray and her co-authors write "Scots-Irish" rather than "Scotch-Irish", following the historian Edward J. Cowan's point that "Scotch" is now the name of a drink.

Influence

shared The Scots-Irish were prominent on the frontier, in the American Revolution and in the Presbyterian churches, and several US presidents had Ulster Scots ancestry. Popular writers have credited them with shaping American independence, country music and military tradition. Historians agree they were important but caution against exaggeration, noting that frontier culture had many sources.

"Ower the sheugh": how many Scots, and from where?

established The North Channel between Kintyre and Torr Head in Antrim is no more than 22 kilometres wide at its narrowest. The historian Patrick Fitzgerald notes that people who cross it still speak of going "ower the sheugh" (a sheugh being a field drainage ditch). Before 1603 Scottish movement into Ulster had mostly come from the Highlands and Isles and was seen in London and Dublin as part of the Irish problem. After James VI became king of England it came to be seen as part of the solution, and Fitzgerald notes that the colonisation schemes tried in the Scottish Isles in the 1590s served as "a laboratory for Ulster".

established Settlement after 1603 drew overwhelmingly on Lowland Scotland, especially the south-west and the Border counties. By 1640 more than twenty thousand British settlers held over half a million acres in the six escheated counties of Armagh, Cavan, Coleraine (renamed Londonderry), Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone. Scots did not merely supplement English settlers; they came to predominate, making up perhaps two-thirds of the British population of those counties by 1640, and three-quarters or more in Antrim and Down. Settlers did not keep to official boundaries. They spread inland along river valleys and into counties beyond Ulster, and Sligo, in Connacht, became one of the most Scottish towns in Ireland.

shared Not all were Presbyterian. The Hamiltons settled Catholic Scots tenants in the barony of Strabane, and Sir Alexander Gordon established a small Catholic Scots enclave near Kilmore in County Cavan. In north Antrim, Randall MacDonnell, the Catholic future Earl of Antrim, recruited Protestant Lowland tenants. And the Crown used Ulster to clear the Anglo-Scottish Borders: Armstrongs, Grahams, Johnstons and Elliotts, nominally Catholic and "notoriously violent" reiving families, were moved, forcibly or voluntarily, to western counties such as Fermanagh, flouting the theory that model planters would "civilize" the native Irish.

Ulster and Scotland's other emigrations

shared Ulster was not the largest destination for Scots in this period. An estimate by T. C. Smout, Ned Landsman and T. M. Devine, cited by Fitzgerald, puts migration from Scotland to Scandinavia and Poland-Lithuania in the first half of the seventeenth century at 55,000–70,000, more than double the 20,000–30,000 who went to Ireland. The difference that mattered was gender. The European flow was mostly male pedlars and soldiers, who intermarried and largely faded into their host societies within two or three generations. Nicholas Canny suggests there were "probably three women for every four men" among Scots crossing to Ulster, and the short crossing let men go home to find a wife. Most Ulster Scots married within their own group, forming tight-knit communities of pastoral farming families.

established Families moved between these streams. Malcolm Hamilton, born at Kilbirnie in Ayrshire in the 1570s, was granted 2,000 acres at Monea in County Fermanagh. Two of his sons served as officers in the Swedish army in the 1620s, were ennobled as barons Hamilton of Deserf, and returned to Fermanagh with Swedish families in 1662. A grandson, Gustavus Hamilton, was Governor of Enniskillen during the Williamite war of 1689–91.

Religion, 1641 and the Scots army in Ulster

established Before 1640 the Church of Ireland in Ulster held what Sean Connolly calls a "distinctive Scottish enclave", including four Scottish bishops and more than sixty Scottish ministers. Tension grew under Charles I. In 1625 a religious revival swept the Six Mile Water valley in south Antrim, with crowds gathering to hear the Scots minister James Glendinning. In 1638 Lord Deputy Wentworth imposed the "Black Oath" requiring Ulster Scots to renounce the National Covenant, and many returned to Scotland rather than swear it. Marianne Elliott concludes that "the early Scots settlers were closer to their Irish counterparts, in dress, work practices and housing, than to the English".

shared The 1641 depositions, testimony from more than eight thousand British settlers, complicate any simple picture of natives against newcomers: some deponents alleged that Scots in parts of Ulster did little to protect English settlers, or even helped the Irish attack them. By mid-1642 an estimated four thousand Ulster Scots refugees were in the presbyteries of Ayr and Irvine alone. In April 1642 Major General Robert Monro landed with a Scots army, directed from Edinburgh rather than London, and that summer its chaplains and elders formed a presbytery at Carrickfergus. This was the start of Presbyterianism as a structure parallel to, and rival with, the Church of Ireland, and as the main badge of Ulster Scots identity.

The later waves, 1650–1715

shared Migration did not stop after 1641. Fitzgerald stresses how much the Ulster Scots population turned over between 1640 and 1660: comparing surnames in the Muster Rolls of the 1630s with the Hearth Money Returns of the 1660s, continuity in north and west Ulster baronies was often below 50 per cent and sometimes as low as 20 per cent. Estimates of migration after the Cromwellian reconquest range from 80,000 down to 10,000; Rab Houston's figure of about 24,000 is the most reasonable guess. Between the Restoration and the Williamite war a similar 20,000–30,000 probably came, many moving back and forth with the persecution of Covenanters in south-west Scotland. In 1683 Donegal was reported "plentifully planted with Protestant inhabitants, especially with great numbers out of Scotland".

shared The heaviest migration came after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, driven by famine in Scotland as much as by cheap Ulster leases. Karen Cullen judges an estimate of 50,000 migrants in the 1690s "not unreasonable". Kirk and burgh records in Ayr show famine migrants, including women and children, receiving charity on their way to Ulster. Fitzgerald notes that this picture of Scots arriving as famine refugees sits uneasily with the popular image of sturdy planters. Ulster's Anglican elite feared being outnumbered by Dissenters, and as late as the 1710s the Catholic Bishop of Clogher wrote of Scots Calvinists "coming over here daily … seizing the farms in the richer parts of the country and expelling the natives".

The eighteenth-century exodus in Fischer's account

shared The historian David Hackett Fischer, in Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), treats the Ulster emigration as part of a larger movement from the lands around the Irish Sea. He estimates that from 1718 to 1775 more than 5,000 people a year left Ireland, Scotland and the north of England for America: at least 150,000 from the north of Ireland, about 75,000 from the west of Scotland and at least 50,000 from northern England. His own notes show how wide the range of estimates for Ulster is: about 114,000 (R. J. Dickson, 1966), 200,000 (James Leyburn, 1962), 250,000 (Wayland Dunaway, 1944), and 155,000 to 205,000 (Bernard Bailyn, 1986). His Scottish figure is high: the same notes cite I. C. C. Graham's count of about 20,000 Scottish emigrants for 1768–75 and Michael Flinn's judgement that Scottish emigration rarely sustained much more than 2,000 a year.

shared The movement came in waves, which Fischer dates to 1718, 1729, 1741, 1755, 1767 and 1774, and he ties surges to crop failures in 1727, 1740 and 1770 and to the collapse of the Ulster linen trade in the early 1770s. He also claims that two-thirds of the whole traffic fell in the decade 1765–75. That claim is hard to square with the yearly averages and Bailyn's figures he quotes, and should be treated with caution.

established Most emigrants travelled as families. Fischer cites Bailyn's study of British records for 1773–76: 61 per cent of emigrants from northern England and 73 per cent from the Scottish border counties travelled in family groups. Of 405 Ulster emigrants who reached the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in 1740, only 37 came as individuals. Surveys of motives stress high rents, short leases, low wages and, in Ulster, hunger. In 1729 two ministers reported that their people received "many letters from their friends" in America urging them to follow.

Philadelphia, the buffer and the Valley

established Most ships landed at Philadelphia or New Castle on the Delaware. The Quaker merchant Jonathan Dickinson wrote in October 1717 that "from the north of Ireland many hundreds" had come, and by 1730 a Pennsylvania land official complained that five families from Ireland gave him more trouble than fifty of any other people. Rather than restrict immigration, the Quaker leadership steered the newcomers west. In 1731 James Logan, the Penn family's chief agent in Pennsylvania and himself a Quaker born in Ulster, told the proprietors that he was settling them in the back parts "as a frontier in case of any disturbance": a buffer between the Indians and the Quaker east. Fischer adds that Logan also frankly hoped to rid the east of them.

established Philadelphia was not the first destination. Ray, drawing on Kerby Miller and his colleagues, notes that before 1710 Ulster emigrants went mainly to the Chesapeake, then to New England, and only from the late 1720s overwhelmingly to Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley, with smaller numbers landing at New York, Charleston, Savannah and Baltimore. Maldwyn Jones, whom she cites, links the shift to the hostility that greeted the first large parties in New England in 1717–18. After 1735, with land scarcer in the north, the Great Wagon Road became the main route south; it ran from the Schuylkill at Philadelphia through Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and eventually stretched over 735 miles to Augusta, Georgia.

established From the Pennsylvania interior, settlers moved south-west down the Great Valley into the Shenandoah, the Carolina Piedmont and beyond. Fischer cites studies of surnames in the first US census of 1790 showing that people of Ulster, Scottish and northern English descent made up a majority in much of this belt, from south-western Pennsylvania to the Carolina upcountry. Their place names mark the route: Londonderry and Antrim in New Hampshire, Donegal in Pennsylvania, many Galloways in North Carolina and Cumberland names across the region.

Clans and chain migration

established Whole kin groups moved in stages. Robert Witherspoon of South Carolina, quoted by Fischer, recorded that his grandparents John and Janet Witherspoon, cousins of the same surname born in Scotland about 1670, lived near Glasgow, moved to County Down in 1695 and left for South Carolina in 1734. Uncles and their families had sailed from Belfast in 1732; another followed in 1736. Grandparents, seven children, at least seventeen grandchildren and other kin settled together. Fischer credits Presbyterian families such as the Witherspoons with holding outdoor "field meetings" in the backcountry from about 1734.

A backcountry elite

shared Fischer argues that a small number of emigrants of substance, mostly arriving in the 1730s, formed a lasting backcountry elite. His examples include the Calhouns, who went from Scotland to Ireland in the seventeenth century and on to America in 1733, settling at Long Cane in the Carolina upcountry, where the Cherokee killed twenty-three of the family in 1760, among them the 76-year-old matriarch Catherine; the Polks, descended from Robert Polk, who emigrated from County Donegal about 1680; and John Houston, who arrived in 1730 and was an ancestor of Sam Houston. Andrew Jackson's grandfather Hugh was a weaver and merchant of Carrickfergus, and his father led a party of emigrants to America in 1765.

shared Fischer uses the battle of King's Mountain in 1780 to show this elite's hold: of the ten backcountry commanders, he says seven of the nine whose origins are known came from the borderlands of North Britain. His own notes show how far that rests on definition. Only William Campbell (of Scottish descent) and Joseph McDowell (son of an Ulster weaver) had Scottish or Ulster backgrounds; the "border" count also includes men of Yorkshire, Cumbrian and Welsh descent.

Regulators, Whigs and Tories

shared Between 1765 and 1771 "Regulator" movements arose in the backcountry of both Carolinas. In South Carolina they were mainly vigilantes acting against bandits; in North Carolina they protested corrupt officials and fees and were crushed at Alamance in 1771. Fischer treats both as expressions of a backcountry sense of insecurity. In the Revolution, he argues, the border settlers were mostly Whig, while the Gaelic-speaking Highlanders of North Carolina's Cape Fear Valley were mainly Tory, in his view largely because their neighbours were Whig. The divide was real but not clean: the Carolina backcountry also produced many Loyalists, and the fighting there was close to civil war.

How big a share? Devine's figures

established The historian T. M. Devine, in To the Ends of the Earth (2011), sets the Ulster emigration against Scotland's own. Between 1600 and 1700 emigrants to the American colonies were overwhelmingly English; between 1700 and 1780 around 70 per cent of British settlers arriving in America came from Ireland and Scotland. From 1700 to 1820 between a quarter and half a million people left Ireland for America, 30 per cent of all European immigrants, and from 1717 to 1776 perhaps two in three Irish emigrants came from Ulster. Scotland, by the most generous estimates, sent about 90,000 to America in 1700–1815, so the Irish rate of emigration was clearly higher even allowing for Ireland's larger population. In 1790 people of identifiable Irish origin made up 14 to 17 per cent of the white population of the United States, about 440,000 to 520,000 of 3.17 million, and upwards of 350,000 of them were Ulster Scots immigrants or their descendants.

shared These are Devine's synthesis figures and sit within the wide range of estimates discussed above. His Scottish figure, far below Fischer's, is the one most modern historians prefer.

shared Ray's survey in Transatlantic Scots shows the same spread. Kerby Miller and his colleagues put perhaps three thousand passengers leaving Ulster between 1680 and 1716, before the mass movement began, and estimate that by the 1730s three-fifths of Ulster's people were Protestants, most of them Presbyterians. Tyler Blethen and Curtis Wood propose at least 250,000 emigrants to North America from the 1680s to the Revolution; Marianne Wokeck, suspecting newspaper exaggeration, about half that; Patrick Griffin, more than 100,000 for 1718–75, which would still make it the largest single movement of any group from the British Isles to British North America in that century. On William Brock's figures, people of Ulster birth or descent made up about 6 per cent of the American population in 1790, alongside about 8.3 per cent of Scottish birth or descent. Miller estimates that half or more of the settlers west of the Appalachians by 1790 were Ulster emigrants or their children, and in the 1990 census 47 per cent of Americans claiming Scots-Irish ancestry lived in the South.

"The scum of two nations"

established Devine contrasts the later legend with contemporary opinion. Theodore Roosevelt, in The Winning of the West, praised these "Irish Presbyterians" as the first immigrants to plunge into the wilderness, kinsfolk of the Covenanters. Eighteenth-century observers were harsher. One writer called them "the scum of two nations", the Anglican itinerant Charles Woodmason wrote of "the herd of vile Irish presbyterians", and even the Quakers of Philadelphia found them "a pernicious and pugnacious people". In Pennsylvania, quarrels with German settlers grew so frequent that the Quaker authorities told their agents to stop selling land to Ulster Scots in German districts and offered them terms to move further west.

The frontier wars

shared Devine is blunt about relations with Native Americans. Early in the century there were few major clashes: the Shenandoah Valley had no large Indian population, and Pennsylvania's Quaker government paid for land and avoided forts and militias. But Ulster Scots land hunger brooked little restraint. Answering complaints about encroachment on Indian land, settlers replied that it was "against the laws of God and nature that so much land should be idle while so many Christians wanted it to labour on". Colonial governments used them as a shield: Massachusetts and South Carolina recruited them as frontier buffers, and in 1756 South Carolina offered inducements to settle its backcountry as a defence against the Cherokee and their French and Spanish allies.

established The Seven Years War turned the frontier into a battleground. After the French and their Indian allies routed Braddock on the Monongahela in 1755, raids fell on settlements from Virginia to Canada. In 1760 about 250 Ulster Scots fleeing towards Augusta, Georgia, were ambushed by over a hundred mounted Cherokee and lost about forty killed or captured, among them the grandmother of John C. Calhoun; the Calhouns lost twenty-three of their kin. Devine reports that over 2,000 settlers were killed in Pennsylvania alone in the raids of these years, which continued into Pontiac's War after 1763.

shared The Ulster Scots answered in kind, burning villages, killing women and children and scalping the dead. With British regulars committed against the French, German settlers mostly retreating and the Quaker assembly refusing on conscience to take up arms, Devine argues that they bore the brunt of the guerrilla war against France's Indian allies. He links their ferocity to their own history: they had occupied the land of dispossessed natives in Ulster too, and could justify frontier war as "smiting of the enemies of the Lord". Other historians stress that frontier violence was general, not peculiar to one ethnic group, and Devine himself argues elsewhere that Scots of every kind behaved much like other colonists towards native peoples.

Scotch-Irish and the later heritage revival

established In the nineteenth century the Ulster Protestant identity in America hardened against Catholic Irish immigration. Ray notes that in the 1840s and 1850s urban Scots-Irish in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and New York were leaders of the anti-Catholic movement and supporters of the nativist "Know-Nothings". From 1851 to 1921 about 4.5 million people left Ireland, a million of them Ulster Protestants. Devine notes that Ulster Protestant immigrants and the Orange Order took a leading part in the anti-Catholic American Protective Association, whose members pledged not to employ Catholics or vote for Catholic candidates, and which claimed 2.5 million members at its height in the 1890s.

shared In the twentieth century the descendants of Ulster emigrants became the backbone of the Scottish heritage revival in the American South. Devine points out that in 1979 between half and two-thirds of the members of American clan and family societies lived in the South, a region that drew few direct emigrants from Scotland, and that most of their ancestry runs through Ulster rather than Scotland. The first Grandfather Mountain Highland Games, held in North Carolina on 19 August 1956, met at MacRae Meadows in the Ulster Scots mountain country rather than in the Cape Fear valley where Highlanders had actually settled. Grady McWhiney's Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (1988) gave this identity a "Celtic" pedigree that Devine, like Fischer, regards as myth more than history.

Making the Scotch-Irish: celebration, kilts and the "Celtic South"

established The celebratory literature began early. Ray, in her chapter of Transatlantic Scots, notes that in 1856 George Chambers published one of the first and most imitated accounts of the "principles, virtues, habits and public usefulness" of the Scots-Irish settlers of Pennsylvania. The first Scotch-Irish Congress met at Columbia, Tennessee, in May 1889 and heard the claim that the Scotch-Irish had contributed more to constitutional liberty in America than any other people; a Scotch-Irish Society of America published its proceedings through the 1890s. Speakers recited a roll of heroes including Patrick Henry, Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. James Craighead's Scotch and Irish Seeds in American Soil (1878), the historian Henry Shapiro argued, made it an academic and popular convention that Appalachian mountaineers were Scots-Irish, and later writers even claimed they spoke "Elizabethan English", which they do not. Serious scholarship, Ray judges, began only with James Leyburn's The Scotch-Irish in 1962, followed by R. J. Dickson, E. R. R. Green, Estyn Evans and the folklorist Henry Glassie in the 1960s, the Ulster-American Heritage Symposium from 1976 and the University of Ulster's Institute of Ulster Scots Studies in 2001.

shared Ray stresses how much was forgotten on the way. The Scots-Irish brought worldview, farming methods, music, building forms and stories such as the Jack Tales, but no distinctive dress, and the historians Tyler Blethen and Curtis Wood call them "a people practiced in abandoning their past". Their descendants therefore borrowed the Highlanders' material culture. In 1996 Radford University in Virginia adopted the MacFarlane as its official tartan and began a Highlander Festival in honour of its Scots-Irish roots; from 1997 Snow Ridge in New York's Adirondacks held a "Scots-Irish" festival with Highland dancing and pipe bands. The emblem of the Scottish-American Military Society, founded at the Grandfather Mountain Games in 1981, shows a Scots-Irish Patriot at the battle of King's Mountain, yet members wear it with Highland kilts, although in the Revolution Patriot Scots-Irish and Loyalist Highlanders were often on opposite sides. Ray argues that the divisions between Highland, Lowland and Ulster Scots, so sharp in the eighteenth century, were fused in heritage lore around Highland and Jacobite imagery. The Grandfather Mountain Games themselves were founded in 1956 by Agnes MacRae Morton, who owned the mountain, and the Charlotte journalist Donald MacDonald, in a Scots-Irish rather than Highland district, partly to attract tourists.

shared The "Celtic South" thesis of Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald, which traced southern herding, honour and fighting habits to Celtic origins, was criticised from the start; the historian Rowland Berthoff answered it in 1986 with "Celtic Mist over the South". Ray writes that anthropologists find its claims of cultural continuity untenable, and argues that southerners took to Scottish heritage because of parallel myths rather than inherited traits: the Jacobite lost cause and the Confederate one, both romanticised through Walter Scott. Hook, a literary historian, notes that McWhiney became one of the founders of the neo-Confederate League of the South, which has used the Celtic thesis politically. Ray adds that few members of Scottish heritage societies belong to the League.

A mixed inheritance: Hook's argument

shared Andrew Hook, in his chapter of Transatlantic Scots, contrasts the positive American self-image of the Scots-Irish, the bold, democratic, freedom-loving frontiersman, with what he sees as a mixed legacy. Drawing on the idea of "Cracker culture", he argues that the honour codes, clannishness, distrust of authority and Calvinist intensity of the southern backcountry also fed feuding, mob rule, lynching and racial oppression, and he cites William Faulkner's fictional hill people, named Gowrie, McCallum and Fraser, as the novelist's own verdict on that inheritance. This is an interpretation, and other historians stress that frontier violence and racism in the South had many sources.

shared Hook and Ray both note the Scottish associations of the Ku Klux Klan, founded at Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865–66, not far from Columbia, where the Scotch-Irish Congress would later praise Grant, whose Reconstruction policy the Klan resisted. Hook quotes the founder John C. Lester's explanation that the word "Klan" suited a group whose members were "all of Scotch descent", and suggests that Scott's novel Anne of Geierstein (1829), with its hooded secret tribunal, helped shape its rituals. The burning or "fiery" cross came later. Hook traces it to Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman (1905), which borrowed the Highland fiery cross from Scott's The Lady of the Lake, and it was taken up by the revived Klan of 1915. Ray, in a note, places the burning cross among the first Klan's rituals; most historians date cross-burning to the second Klan. Neither Hook nor Ray suggests that Scottish heritage itself was the cause: the point is how readily its imagery was borrowed.

Fischer's borderland thesis and its critics

shared Fischer's broader argument is that these emigrants carried a distinct culture from the Anglo-Scottish Border, and from the Ulster society the Border helped to people, into the southern highlands. He traces backcountry speech to northern English and Scots, argues that the cabin plan came from the single-room cabins of North Britain (while accepting that the log technique itself came from Scandinavians and Germans), and links backcountry kin networks, feuding and "clannishness" to Border clans such as the Armstrongs and Grahams. He rejects calling the emigrants "Celts" and stresses that they were "a mixed people".

shared The thesis has been widely criticised. Reviewers, including those in a William and Mary Quarterly forum on the book in 1991 and the historian Ned Landsman, argued that Fischer overstates continuity across the Atlantic, lumps Lowland Scots, Ulster Presbyterians and English northerners into a single "North British" culture, and relies heavily on evidence from Cumberland and Westmorland, which are in England, and on hostile witnesses such as the Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason. Fischer's own notes concede that the emigration counts of Dickson, Graham and Flinn are too low to match American estimates of the "Scotch-Irish" population, and he reconciles them by suggesting many so-called Scotch-Irish were English borderers or Anglo-Irish. His work is best read as a stimulating interpretation, not a settled account.

• The North Channel between Kintyre and Antrim is only about 22 km wide; Ulster people still speak of crossing it as going "ower the sheugh".
• In the early seventeenth century more than twice as many Scots went to Scandinavia and Poland-Lithuania as to Ireland.
• Sligo, in Connacht rather than Ulster, became one of the most Scottish towns in seventeenth-century Ireland.
• Scottish settlement in Ulster began in 1606, before the official Plantation.
• Ulster Scots is the Scots language as spoken in Ulster.
• "Scotch-Irish" is an American term.
• Many Scots-Irish emigrants landed at Philadelphia.
• Several American presidents had Ulster Scots ancestry.
• In 1731 Pennsylvania's James Logan deliberately settled Ulster newcomers on the western edge of the colony as a human buffer.
• A 1772 Virginia newspaper advertisement described a runaway African slave who could "speak the Scotch-Irish dialect".
• One Pennsylvania settler rejected the label outright: "We're no Eerish bot Scoatch."
• Philadelphia's Quaker authorities once told their land agents to stop selling to Ulster Scots in German districts because of constant quarrels.
• The first Grandfather Mountain Highland Games, in 1956, were held in Ulster Scots country, not in the Cape Fear valley where Highlanders had settled.
• The Witherspoon family moved from near Glasgow to County Down in 1695 and on to South Carolina in the 1730s.
• The Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia eventually stretched over 735 miles to Augusta, Georgia.
• The first Scotch-Irish Congress, in 1889, claimed Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant among its heroes.
• In 1996 Radford University in Virginia adopted the MacFarlane tartan to honour its Scots-Irish roots, though Ulster settlers did not wear tartan.

• Disputed: How many Scots crossed to Ulster in the seventeenth century. Estimates for the migration after the Cromwellian reconquest range from 10,000 to 80,000, and Patrick Fitzgerald prefers Rab Houston's 24,000. For the 1690s, Karen Cullen judges about 50,000 "not unreasonable". Many migrants moved back and forth with the persecution of Covenanters.
• Disputed: How many Ulster people emigrated to America. Estimates for 1718–75 run from about 114,000 (R. J. Dickson) to 250,000, with Bernard Bailyn's 155,000–205,000 a common middle range. Their influence on American culture, religion and politics is real but sometimes exaggerated.
• Disputed: The legacy of the Plantation. The Plantation dispossessed many Gaelic Irish, who were moved to poorer land or stayed as tenants on land they once controlled. Resentment fed the rising of 1641, and the Plantation is a root of the divisions in Northern Ireland today.
• Disputed: Fischer's "borderland" thesis. David Hackett Fischer argues that emigrants carried a distinct Border culture to the American backcountry. Critics say he overstates continuity, lumps Lowland Scots, Ulster Presbyterians and English northerners together, and relies heavily on evidence from Cumberland and Westmorland, which are in England. He rejects the label "Celts" and calls the emigrants "a mixed people".
• Myth: The Scots-Irish were all heroic pioneers. The heroic image was largely built by nineteenth-century admirers. Eighteenth-century observers called them "the scum of two nations", and their frontier expansion cost Native Americans land and lives, with violence on both sides.
• Myth: Ulster Scots emigrants wore kilts and clan tartans. They brought no distinctive dress. Their descendants borrowed Highland tartans in the twentieth-century heritage revival.
• Myth: Scottish heritage in the American South descends mainly from Highland emigrants. Much of it traces to Ulster. The first Grandfather Mountain Games, in 1956, were held in Ulster Scots country, not where Highlanders had settled.
• Myth: The Revolution split neatly into Whig Scots-Irish and Tory Highlanders. The divide was real but not clean: the Carolina backcountry also produced many Loyalists, and the fighting there was close to civil war.
• Myth: Appalachian people speak "Elizabethan English". They do not. That idea came from early writers on the mountaineers.
• Disputed: The "Celtic South". Grady McWhiney's thesis that southern culture had Celtic roots was criticised from the start, and anthropologists find its claims of cultural continuity untenable.
• Disputed: The Scots-Irish legacy. Andrew Hook argues it was mixed, including feuding, lynching and racial oppression, and Hook and Ray note the Scottish associations of the early Ku Klux Klan and the later political use of the Celtic thesis. Neither suggests Scottish heritage was the cause, and other historians stress that frontier violence and racism had many sources.