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Scots-Irish Americans

The Scots-Irish are an important American cultural group that had a profound influence in creating the contemporary American south.

The Scots-Irish were originally immigrants who migrated to the south during the 17th and 18th centuries. The Scots-Irish were formerly lowland Scots from the borderlands between Scotland and England.

History

In 1610, King James began sending shiploads of Scots to Northern Ireland in an effort to subdue Ireland through social colonization rather than military conquest. This practice was later used to help rid England of its political prisoners and those captured in war. However, King James did not count on the Scots remaining connected to their clans and banding together to oppose the Irish at the Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland. After many years of toil, the Scots-Irish were no better off in Ireland than they had been in Scotland. This prompted many of the Scots-Irish to immigrate to America.

The Scots-Irish came to the colonies in several migration streams between 1717 and 1775. The migration streams in 1754 and 1755 helped to settle the Carolinas and served as a buffer between the developing coastal cities and Native Americans living along the frontier. The Scots-Irish had a profound influence on these areas in the American south. One vignette that illustrates this influence is the story of an Englishman who observed a local stage driver singing the well-known Scotch song “Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot,” a Celtic tune often attributed to the poet Robert Burns. The English assumed the stage driver was an immigrant from Scotland. “But to my surprise,” wrote the Englishman, “I found he had not been out of North Carolina, though his feelings appeared nearly as true to the land of his forefathers, as if they had never left it.” This Englishman's observations and comments help illustrate the profound influence that the Scots-Irish migrations of the 17th and 18th centuries had in terms of creating the American south.

In both historical and contemporary American culture, the Scots-Irish are an important piece of the social fabric. Their experiences in their native lands had primed them to survive in the American south. These “borderers” were accustomed to insecure land tenure, limited state capacity, conflict, and poverty, and gravitated toward the backcountry and frontier areas. Eventually, they dominated much of the rural south and southwest, where their cultures had lasting and powerful effects on the social, cultural, and political landscape.

Part of the White Underclass

However, these effects have not always been characterized in positive terms. There has been retaliation against these “backcountry” individuals, who have been seen as unduly proud, distrustful of legal institutions, resentful of land-use controls, disdainful of social hierarchies, and prone to using violence to solve conflicts directly. David Hackett Fischer writes, “They were a degraded rural proletariat who had no hope of rising to the top of their society.”

The Scots-Irish were historically a part of the white underclass in America. Throughout much of America's history, poor whites from the rural south have been little more than sharecroppers. In addition, throughout American history, those from Appalachia have also been among the poorest of the poor in America. Although the Scots-Irish have made some gains both socially and economically, many of them (who likely no longer think of themselves as Scots-Irish), still have a long way to go in terms of achieving any measurable degree of equality. Despite these negative impressions of southerners who were culturally influenced by the Scots-Irish, the Scots-Irish are an important piece of the social fabric in both historical and contemporary American culture.

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