The Scots were not long settled in Ulster before misfortune and persecution began to harass them.  The Irish rebellion of 1641, said by some to have been an outbreak directed against the Scottish and English settlers, regarded by the native Irish as intruders and usurpers, caused them much suffering; and Harrison says that for “several years afterward 12,000 emigrants annually left Ulster for the American plantations.”  The Revolution of 1688 was also long and bloody in Ireland and the sufferings of the settlers reached a climax in the siege of Londonderry (April to August, 1688).  They suffered also from the restrictions laid upon their industries and commerce by the English government.  These restrictions, and later the falling in of leases, rack-renting by the landlords, payment of tithes for support of a church with which they had no connection, and several other burdens and annoyances, were the motives which impelled emigration to the American colonies from 1718 onwards.  Five ships bearing seven hundred Ulster Scots emigrants arrived in Boston on August 4, 1718, under the leadership of Rev. William Boyd.  They were allowed to select a township site of twelve miles square at any place on the frontiers.  A few settled at Portland, Maine, at Wicasset, and at Worcester and Haverhill, Massachusetts, but the greater number finally at Londonderry, New Hampshire.  In 1723-4 they built a parsonage and a church for their minister, Rev. James MacGregor.  In six years they had four schools, and within nine years Londonderry paid one-fifteenth of the state tax.  Previous to the Revolution of 1776 ten distinct settlements were made by colonists from Londonderry, N.H., all of which became towns of influence and importance.  Notable among the descendants of these colonists were Matthew Thornton, Henry Knox, Gen. John Stark, Hugh McCulloch, Horace Greeley, Gen. George B. McClellan, Salmon P. Chase, and Asa Gray.  From 1771 to 1773 “the whole emigration from Ulster is estimated at 30,000 of whom 10,000 were weavers.”

In 1706 the Rev. Cotton Mather put forth a plan to settle hardy Scots families on the frontiers of Maine and New Hampshire to protect the towns and churches there from the French and Indians, the Puritans evidently not being able to protect themselves.  He says, “I write letters unto diverse persons of Honour both in Scotland and in England; to procure Settlements of Good Scotch Colonies, to the Northward of us.  This may be a thing of great consequence;” and elsewhere he suggests that a Scottish colony might be of good service in getting possession of Nova Scotia.  In 1735, twenty-seven families, and in 1753 a company of sixty adults and a number of children, collected in Scotland by General Samuel Waldo, were landed at George’s River, Maine.  In honor of the ancient capital of their native country, they named their settlement Stirling.