Northern Irish Americans

Northern Irish Americans trace their heritage to northern Ireland, the part of the Irish island that is now politically separate from the Republic of Ireland to the south. The Republic of Ireland is Catholic and is the source of most of the Irish immigrants who came to the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but Northern Ireland is predominantly Protestant, and most of its immigrants arrived in the colonial and early national periods. Northern Irish Americans are often Scots-Irish or Scotch-Irish Americans, a term only commonly found in the United States.

Northern Ireland is often referred to as Ulster, although Ulster is a region consisting of nine counties, three of which are in the Republic of Ireland. The term's popularity, though, is owed to many Northern Irish and Northern Irish Americans tracing their heritage to the Ulster Scots people, an ethnic group descended mainly from the [Page 1622]Border Reivers, a kinship-based society of raiders along the Anglo-Scottish border, as well as from northern English dissenters. During the reign of King James, the monarch of both Scotland and England, many of these border Scots relocated to the Ulster region of Ireland as part of the Plantation of Ulster, an organized colonization effort that began around 1606.

Colonization was limited to English-speaking Protestants, most of whom were Presbyterians, and the purpose of colonization was to dilute the population of Ireland in order to prevent rebellion. The Plantation of Ulster is often blamed for leading to the Partition of Ireland in 1921, which came about as a result of growing cultural, political, and religious differences between the north and south.

Though one of the goals of the government in the Plantation of Ulster was to Anglicize Ireland through colonization, the Ulster Scots faced persecution at the end of the 17th century, when the Penal Laws granted full rights only to the state-approved Church of Ireland and its members, not the Irish Catholics or the Ulster Scots Presbyterians. This began a period of immigration of Ulster Scots to the United States.

Immigration was steady until 1775, halted because of the Revolutionary War, and peaked in the early 19th century. Because Northern Irish Protestants preceded the large waves of southern Irish Catholics who immigrated later, it is possible that some of the anti-Catholic, anti-Irish sentiment those later immigrants faced was fostered by Northern Irish Americans who still harbored resentments toward their ancestors’ Catholic neighbors. The term Scotch-Irish was coined in the mid-19th century by Northern Irish Americans—who had previously called themselves Irish—to differentiate themselves from southern Irish Catholics.

Many of the first Northern Irish American settlers were responsible for settling the frontier in New England: the regions of what are now Maine and New Hampshire, then part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Northern Irish Americans were likely responsible for introducing the potato to Maine, where it became a staple crop and a key ingredient in the region's traditional clam chowder. Though indigenous to the New World, potatoes originated in South America, not North America, and were popularized in Europe long before Americans began to cultivate them.

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