Sponsored by the East Tennessee Historical Society, Irish journalist-author Billy Kennedy spoke in March, 2001, at regional venues: Dandridge (Tennessee), Roanoke (Virginia) and Cumberland Gap Centre, Middlesboro (Kentucky).
Heroism was a distinct characteristic of the Scots-Irish immigrants who settled on the American frontier in the 18th century and the raw courage shown by this dogged, determined people in very difficult circumstances helped shape the fabric of the United States as an embryonic nation and, ultimately, as the world power it is today.
Forging a civilisation out of a wilderness was a real challenge for the tens of thousands of Ulster Presbyterians who landed on American shores in different waves 200-250 years ago, and how well they succeeded in moulding a decent, law-abiding society, from the eastern New England seaboard states, into the Appalachian region, south to Texas and Mississippi and west towards California on the Pacific coastline.
The Scots-Irish heroes, and the heroines (the wonderful womenfolk who made the family, the home and Christianity the cornerstone of frontier life!) have become enshrined in American history, not just US Presidents, statesmen, soldiers and churchmen, but the many plain ordinary citizens whose quiet, unselfish deeds were worthy of note and a shining example to others.
The outstandingly high level of achievement by so many luminaries from the Scots-Irish diaspora in states like Tennessee, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas must be measured against the great suffering and pain first families endured during early formative years on the frontier.
Faith and Freedom were the cherished watchwords of the doughty Scots-Irish Presbyterians, and these ideals kept them going as they moved during the 17th century Plantation years over the short sea journey from Scotland to Ulster, and then trekked arduously across the Atlantic on the adventure into the great unknown of the frontier lands of the "New World."
God-fearing Scots-Irish, or Ulster-Scots, combined in their ideals: a total reverence for the Almighty, a deep devotion to their families, sincere love of country and passionate belief in their liberty. Generally as a people the Scots-Irish stayed true to the four main cornerstones of life: God, Country, Family and Liberty, although there were some, as in every community, who did not attain these standards.
The Scots-Irish were well-prepared for establishing settlements on the American frontier. They had endured, for more than a century life in the harsh, rugged and, in parts, hostile countryside of the north of Ireland and by the time they reached America had survived wars, sieges, famines, drought and religious persecuation. They were a people certainly not deterred by the dangers they faced in their new environment, and most found the wide open spaces to their liking.
Indeed, largely due to past experiences in lowland Scotland and the north of Ireland, Scots-Irish fared much better than other white ethnic groups like the English, Germans, Welsh, Dutch, Scottish highlanders and Scandinavians in resisting hostilities of the native American tribes; in fending off English, French and Spanish colonial predators and oppressors and in pushing the frontier south and west to its outer limits.
The Scots-Irish effectively set parameters of life in many cities and towns along the western frontier of 18th century America, and with close identification to church, school and home they were able to lay foundations for a civilised society, which placed total emphasis on a belief in God and in the liberty of conscience and democracy.
Celebrated Northern Ireland historian-folklorist the Rev W. F. Marshall summed up their work ethic and commitment to a cause: "The Scots-Irish were the first to start and the last to quit. Vigour and grit of the race were seen in their pioneering instinct."
The early Scots-Irish settlers were willing, even eager, to go beyond the "outer fringe of civilisa" and establish settlements on the frontier. Their experience as colonists in Ireland had made them adaptable and assimilative of the best traits needed for survival on the frontier and their farming methods -- the slash-and-burn clearing of farms, corn-based cropping and the running of livestock in open woods -- were techniques ideally suited for the southern Appalachian backcountry.
Three hundred years have elapsed since the first Scots-Irish immigrants landed on American soil and, in that time the enormous landscape they inhabited has changed beyond all recognition, with political, social and cultural perspectives of the population now increasingly diverse in what has become a great melting pot of humanity.
Fundamentals of Faith and Freedom, so profound, meaningful and enriching to the proud pioneering people from Ulster and lowland Scotland, were permanently enshrined in the constitutional imperatives of the American nation, and today they are testimony to all that was achieved in early formative years of struggle and supreme sacrifice on the frontier. The Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, which Ulstermen helped draw up, contained fine Christian sentiments: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator, with certain inalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty, pursuit of happiness."
John Patterson MacLean, noted 19th century historian, said of the Scots-Irish: "They practised strict discipline in morals and gave instruction to the youth in their schools and in teaching Biblical scriptures. To all this combined in a remarkable degree, acuteness of intellect, firmness of purpose and concientiousness to duty."
From Pennsylvania through the Shenadoah Valley of Virginia to the Carolinas along the Great Wagon Road they came; to Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, on to the territories of Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and California. The Scots-Irish blazed the pioneering trail in America for others to follow. They were a durable, determined people with the special personal stamp needed to tame the wilds of the frontier, and make it a place for civilised family life.
The Scots-Irish who settled on the American fontier through the 18th century were of the people who moved across from lowland Scotland from 1610 in the Ulster Plantation. They made the short sea journey from Ayrshire, Argyllshire, Renfrewshire, Lanarkshire, Dumfriesshire to principally counties Antrim, Down, Londonderry, Tyrone, Donegal. In the passage of time, many of them, because of religious persecution and economic deprivation, faced the long arduous trek across the Atlantic.
North Carolina academic James G. Leyburn, in a social history of the Scotch-Irish, described the Scots who moved to Ulster as humble folk with ambition and qualities of character that made good pioneers. "Even Presbyterian ministers who worked among them in Ulster were usually from humbler walks of Scottish life, for The Kirk offered no sinecures for younger sons of the gentry." Scots-Irish were a unique people and the extent of their influence in the establishment of the USA after the Revolutionary War was considerable. Scots-Irish are described as clannish, contentious, hard to get on with, set in their ways. A Scots-Irish prayer ran: "Lord grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest I am hard to turn."
As Presbyterians, this independent spirited people were non-conformist to the Established church of the day, the Anglican or Episcopalian code, and during their 18th century settlement in Ulster they found great obstacles raised to the means of propagating and witnessing for their Calvinist doctrine and faith.
For about 100 years from 1610, the Scots worked the farms and the textile industry with French Huguenots. They erected meeting houses for Presbyterian form of worship, schools for their children's education. In Presbyterian mindset, the church and the school are inter-twinned and this was the case when the Scots-Irish arrived in Ireland, and subsequently in America.
During the reign of Queen Anne, from about 1702, a High Anglican church faction became dominant in government circles in London, enacting laws which weighed heavily on the minds and consciences of the Ulster Presbyterians. These laws required all officer-holders under the Crown in Ireland to take sacraments of the established Episcopal Church and, as many Presbyterians were magistrates and civil servants in towns like Belfast, Londonderry, Lisburn and Carrickfergus, they were automatically disqualified unless they renounced the Calvinist faith of their forefathers in Scotland.
Members of the Roman Catholic faith, who in the main constituted the native Irish population in Ireland, also bore the brunt of the discriminatory Test Act. However, in the administering of religion Roman Catholic priests were at least recognised by the High Churchmen as being lawfully ordained. Not so Presbyterian ministers, and right across the north of Ireland they were turned out of their pulpits and threatened with legal proceedings should they defy the Episcopal edict from London. Ministers had no official standing; they were unable to sanctify marriage, to ofciate at the burial of members of their congregations, confer baptism, and prevented from teaching on any aspect of Presbyterian doctrine.
This was a narrow ill-thought-out piece of legislation which left the Presbyterian population of Ulster, by then a highly significant section of the community, deeply resentful and almost totally alienated from political masters in the English Established church. It had the effect of making the Presbyterian people speak increasingly of starting a new life in America. Their protests were ignored and there was, from the pulpit to the pew, the feeling that this might be the only way to ease the suffering.
The harsh economics of life in the north of Ireland in the early 18th century was another salient factor which made immigration more appealing. Four years of drought made life almost unbearable for the small peasant farmers on the hillsides of Ulster and, with the High Church landlords staking claims to exhorbitant rents (evictions were commonplace in Ulster at the time!), and the textile industry in recession, movement of the Scots-Irish to America began in earnest.
The 150-tonne Eagle Wing was the first passenger ship to set sail from Ulster's shores to America, but the 1636 voyage from tiny County Down port Groomsport was aborted after heavy mid-Atlantic storms. Some 140 Presbyterians from both sides of Belfast Lough left Groomsport on September 9 for Boston. The journey ended in Carrickfergus Bay on November 3 with ship's shrouds asunder, mainsail in ribbons and rudder badly damaged.
It was a traumatic experience for the voyagers who had completed three-quarters of their journey when one of the Presbyterian ministers on board the Rev John Livingstone advised that it was God's will they should return home. The ship's captain was of similar mind, the ship was turned around. The Eagle Wing journey, nothwithstanding its apparent failure, is remarkable in that it took place 16 years after the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock after crossing the Atlantic on the Mayflower.
Between 1717 and the American Revolutionary War period, an estimated quarter of a million people left the north of Ireland for the New World, most of them Presbyterian stock. They sailed, in simple wooden sailing ships, from Belfast, Larne, Londonderry, Portrush and Newry, arriving at Philadelphia, New Castle and Charleston. The hazardous journey across the Atlantic took an enormous toll on some, but despite health perils faced through over-crowding, and lack of food and water, most reached their destination to start a new life in more amenable surroundings.
In 1717 - the first year the ships were chartered for 5,000 men and women to head to Pennsylvania - drought completely ruined crops on the Ulster farmlands. Poverty in the homeland, and restrictions placed on dissenting faith, by the ruling British Establishment of the day, made the promise of a better life irresistable.
There were five great waves of Ulster Presbyterian emigration to America: in 1717-18, 1725-29, 1740-41, 1754-55 and 1771-75. The Irish famine of 1739-41 had resulted in the death of 400,000 people and when the Ulster settlers arrived in America in those years they set their sights beyond the borders of Pennsylvania - along the path of the Great Wagon Road down through the Valley of Virginia, the Shenandoah, and on to South and North Carolina. Next to the English, the Scots-Irish became by the end of the 18th century, the most influential of the white population in America, which by 1790, numbered 3,173,444. At the time, the Scots-Irish segment of the population totalled about 14 per cent and this figure was much higher in the Appalachian states.
The Scots-Irish totally assimilated into the mainstream of American society. They were, of course, first Americans, and pioneered new townships, after cutting their way through dense forests and traversing formidable river and mountain barriers.
The Revolutionary War was a watershed for the contribution the Scots-Irish made to American life and it is estimated that up to 75 per cent of this disaspora back the patriot cause against the Crown. As many as 10 of the 56 signatories of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776 were of Ulster origin. John Hancock, President of Congress, was the best known - he had family ties to County Down. John Dunlap, who moved to America from Strabane, County Tyrone, printed the first copies of the Declaration, while Colonel John Nixon, of Ulster grandparents, gave the first public reading of the document in Philadelphia on July 8, 1776.
Seventeen of the 42 US Presidents have Scots-Irish ancestry: Andrew Jackson, James Knox Polk, Andrew Johnson, James Buchannan, Ulysses Simpson Grant, Chester Alan Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Richard Millhouse Nixon, James Earl Carter, George Bush Sen., William Jefferson Clinton and George W. Bush.
James Buchanan, whose family came from County Tyrone, said: "My Ulster blood is my most priceless heritage."
John C. Calhoun, eminent 19th century South Carolina statesman, was Vice-President for two terms; his father Patrick was a Co Donegal Presbyterian. Charles Thomson, Continental Congress Secretary for 15 years until 1789, left his Maghera, County Londonderry homeland at the age of 10. He was a close associate of George Washington and designed the first Great Seal of America.
Statesmen, politicians, soldiers and frontiersmen. There was Davy Crockett, born at Limestone, Tennessee, grandson of an Ulster emigrant from East Donegal/North Tyrone, while Houston, born at Lexington, Virginia, was of an East Antrim family. Their lifestyles and exploits centred on Tennessee and Texas are legendary.
The men who founded Nashville in 1780 -- John Donelson (Andrew Jackson's father-in-law!) and James Robertson -- were of County Antrim roots, while founding fathers of Knoxville were also of Ulster vintage -- James White, his grandfather was from Londonderry, and John Adair and George McNutt, born Ballymena, Co Antrim.
There were illustrious churchman: Rev Samuel Doak, who raised the standard for the Overmountain Men at the battle of Kings Mountain by taking inspiration from the deeds of Gideon; Rev Joseph Rhea; Rev John Craig (his Shenandoah Valley parish in the 1740s extended to thousands of miles!); Rev William Martin, outspoken fiery Covenanter, and Rev William Tennant, of the Princeton log cabin theological college.
Nine of the 189 men, mostly Texans and Tennesseans, who died at The Alamo in March, 1836, fighting for the freedom and liberty of Texas, were born in Ireland, mostly in Ulster, and many others in this gallant number, like Davy Crockett, were first, second or third generation away from 18th century Scots-Irish pioneering settlers who crossed the Atlantic on the immigrant ships. Irish-born soldiers who died at The Alamo were: Samuel Burns, Andrew Duvalt, Robert Evans, Joseph Mark Hawkins, James McGee, Jackson J. Rusk, Burke Trammel and William B. Ward
Many Civil War soldiers of distinction on the Confederate and Union sides were of Ulster-Scots origin: they included Thomas Jonathan "Stone" Jackson, whose great grandfather John Jackson came from the Birches in County Armagh; J. E. B. Stuart, a great-great-grandson of Archibald Stuart from Londonderry; Ulysses Simpson Grant, George Brinton McClellan and Ambrose Everett Burnside.
Others of Scots-Irish roots were: Samuel Lanthorn Clements (author Mark Twain; poet-playwright Edgar Allen Poe; 19th century farm machine inventor Cyrus McCormick; Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon; songwriter Stephen Collins Foster; County Antrim-born James Adair, who in the mid-18th century wrote the first authoritative book on native American tribes; James Maitland Stewart, the Holywood film actor; frontier mountain man Kit Carson, and William Clark, who, with Meriwether Lewis, led the great expedition in 1804-06 from Mississippi over the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. The Clark-Lewis expedition, initiated by President Thomas Jefferson, was remarkable in its exploration of soil, climate, plant and animal life. Clark's Virginian family were of Ulster origin. The wealthy Hearst publishing dynasty also traces its roots back to John Hearst, a County Monaghan Presbyterian who, along with 300 kinsfolk, sailed from Newry, County Down in 1764 for a fare of six shillings and eightpence each.
In the United States today an estimated 44 million people claim Irish extraction. Of these, 56 per cent can trace their roots back to the Scots-Irish Presbyterians who moved in the 18th century. There were many daring exploits by this people who tamed the American frontier. They were a people undeterred, God-fearing with a sterling work ethic and a stake in life which unrelentingly pushed them towards new horizons.
A simple inscription at Greenville Presbyterian Church in the South Carolina Piedmont region sums up the contribution of the Scots-Irish in America: "Sacred to the memory of the Scots-Irish pioneers. From the home land they brought their faith to enrich the South. Their brave hearts and strong arms to subdue the wilderness."
* Scots-Irish Chronicles by Billy Kennedy: Scots-Irish in the Hills of Tennessee (1995); Scots-Irish in the Shenandoah Valley (1996); Scots-Irish in the Carolinas (1997); Scots-Irish in Pennsylvania and Kentucky (1998); Faith and Freedom: Scots-Irish in America (1999); Heroes of the Scots-Irish in America (2000).
Scots-Irish: Quotations
* GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON said: "If defeated everywhere else, I will make my stand for liberty among the Scots-Irish in my native Virginia."
* PRESIDENT WILLIAM McKINLEY said: "The Scots-Irish were the first to proclaim for liberty in these United States. Even before Lexington, Scots-Irish blood had been shed for American freedom. In the forefront of every battle was seen their burnished mail and in the retreat was heard their voice of constancy."
* Confederacy leader ROBERT E. LEE was once asked: "What race of people do you believe make the best soldiers?" He replied: "The Scots who came to this country by way of Ireland."
* PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT said: "It is doubtful if we fully realised the part played by this stern and verile people. They formed the kernel of that American stock who were the pioneers of our people in the march westwards. They were bold and hardy people who pushed beyond the settled regions of American and plunged into the wilderness as the leaders of the white advance. The Presbyterians were the first and the last set of immigrants to do this. All others have merely followed in the wake of their predecessors."
* PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON once said: "The beauty about a Scotch-Irishman is that he not only thinks he is right, but he knows he is right."
* Historian J. A FROUDE said: "The Scots-Irish had a system of religious faith which has ever borne an inflexible front to illusion and mendacity, and has preferred to be ground like flint than to bend before violence or melt under enervating temptation."
* American historian the REV JETHRO RUMPLE said: "We have good reason to be proud of the early pioneers from Ireland and Germany, others of English, Welsh and Scottish descent. They laid the foundations of their homes. They were men and women who suffered from conscience sake, or fled from despotism to seek liberty unrestrained by the shackles of a worn-out civilisation."
* 19th century American historian GEORGE BANCROFT said: "They brought to America no submissive love for England; and their experience and their religion alike bade them meet opposition with prompt resistance. The first voice publicly raised in America to dissolve all connection with Great Britain came not from the Puritains of New England or the Dutch of New York or the planters of Virginia, but Scots-Irish Presbyterians. A paradoxical fact regarding the Scotch-Irish is that they are very little Scotch and much less Irish. They do not belong mainly to the so-called Celtic race, but they are the most composite of all of the people of the British Isles. They are called Scots because they lived in Scotoia, and they are called Irish because they moved to Ireland. Geography and ethnology has given them their name."
* Historian CHARLES WILLIAM DABNEY said: "Wherever the Scotch-Irish settled in America they started schools. As the parsons were the best educated men in they taught the youth as part of their ministry. In time, the schools they started in their frontier congregations grew to be common schools for all. Later some of them became academies and a few became colleges and universities. In this way, Ulster Presbyterians did more to start schools in the south and west than any other people."
* JAMES LOGAN, Ulster-born Provincial Secretary in Pennsylvania in the early 18th century, wrote: "A settlement of five families from the north of Ireland give me more trouble than 50 of any other people." Logan admitted the Scots-Irish were "troublesome settlers and hard neighbours to the Indi" Many settled on lands without bothering to secure legal rights for it -- they started the practice of squatting.
