SCOTTISH EMIGRATION TO THE AMERICAN COLONIES

Scottish emigration to America came in two streams—­one direct from the motherland and the other through the province of Ulster in the north of Ireland.  Those who came by this second route are usually known as “Ulster Scots,” or more commonly as “Scotch-Irish,” and they have been claimed as Irishmen by Irish writers in the United States.  This is perhaps excusable but hardly just.  Throughout their residence in Ireland the Scots settlers preserved their distinctive Scottish characteristics, and generally described themselves as “the Scottish nation in the north of Ireland.”  They, of course, like the early pioneers in this country, experienced certain changes through the influence of their new surroundings, but, as one writer has remarked, they “remained as distinct from the native population as if they had never crossed the Channel.  They were among the Irish but not of them.”  Their sons, too, when they attended the classes in the University of Glasgow, signed the matriculation register as “A Scot of Ireland.”  They did not intermarry with the native Irish, though they did intermarry to some extent with the English Puritans and with the French Huguenots. (These Huguenots were colonies driven out of France by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and induced to settle in the north of Ireland by William III.  To this people Ireland is indebted for its lace industry, which they introduced into that country.)

Again many Irish-American writers on the Scots Plantation of Ulster have assumed that the Scots settlers were entirely or almost of Gaelic origin, ignoring the fact, if they were aware of it, that the people of the Scottish lowlands were “almost as English in racial derivation as if they had come from the North of England.”  Parker, the historian of Londonderry, New Hampshire, speaking of the early Scots settlers in New England, has well said:  “Although they came to this land from Ireland, where their ancestors had a century before planted themselves, yet they retained unmixed the national Scotch character.  Nothing sooner offended them than to be called Irish.  Their antipathy to this appellation had its origin in the hostility then existing in Ireland between the Celtic race, the native Irish, and the English and Scotch colonists.”  Belknap, in his History of New Hampshire (Boston, 1791) quotes a letter from the Rev. James MacGregor (1677-1729) to Governor Shute in which the writer says:  “We are surprised to hear ourselves termed Irish people, when we so frequently ventured our all for the British Crown and liberties against the Irish papists, and gave all tests, of our loyalty, which the government of Ireland required, and are always ready to do the same when demanded.”