THE SCOTCH-IRISH ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIER
History of the Scots-Irish and Emigration:
Within a century of the Norman conquest of England, adventurous Norman knights began carving out small kingdoms in the ancient Celtic island of Ireland. It was not long before the Norman monarchy of England under Henry II began laying plans to subjugate Ireland to the Anglo-Norman throne, but his goal was never fulfilled. For the next four hundred years, the Irish remained a thorn in the side of the English monarchs; their militant independence and their unyielding Catholicism did little to endear them to the kings and queens of England, who were generally Protestant after Henry VIII and who wished to see Ireland brought under the control of the English crown.
The northernmost province of Ireland, known as Ulster, was especially troublesome for the English monarchy, and was the scene of a bloody revolt against the forces of Queen Elizabeth I in the late sixteenth century. At the same time, both the English and Scottish monarchs were experiencing problems in the border area between southern or Lowland Scotland and northern England. Unable to sustain their growing population, the clans along the English-Scottish border turned to cattle rustling, kidnapping, thievery and other outlaw endeavors in order to support their families. These “Border Reevers” made the border area between Scotland and England a lawless and dangerous place to live, and brought the region to the unwelcome attention of the both monarchies.
After Queen Elizabeth I died childless in 1603, her cousin James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne, thus becoming King James I of England and combining the crowns of both Scotland and England into a unified Great Britain. Within a few years of ascending the English throne, King James came up with a plan that he believed would solve his problems in both Ireland and Scotland. The opportunity for the planting of a Protestant colony in Ireland came in September 1607, when the Roman Catholic Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, in fear of King James, fled the country and took refuge in Catholic France. This event, known in Irish history as the “Flight of the Earls,” resulted in the lands of these noblemen being forfeited (escheated) to the English Crown. These “escheated” lands amounted to approximately six of the nine counties of Ulster, i. e., the counties of Antrim, Down, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Coleraine (later renamed Londonderry) and Donegal.
James granted these large tracts of land to several English nobles and London merchants, with the understanding that they would resettle the land, grow crops, and make the plantation profitable. Since James was a both a Scot and a Protestant himself, he was anxious for Protestants from Scotland and England to inhabit the Ulster colony. The Highlanders of northern Scotland, who still spoke the ancient Gaelic language and adhered to the Catholic faith of their Irish cousins, were almost as troublesome as the native Irish and thus were not included in the colonization process. In 1610 King James formally initiated the process of transplanting the troublesome border clans from Lowland Scotland and northern England to Ulster, where they could become productive farmers and loyal Protestant subjects of the crown. The Ulster Irish who had lived on the land for generations were driven off from their homes or, at best, allowed to remain as forced laborers for their Protestant landlords.[1]
Records clearly document from which lowland areas most of the early settlers in Ulster derived. Galloway, that region of the southwest which included the shires of Ayre, Dumfries, Renfrew, Dumbarton, and Lanark, provided the greatest number, for the obvious reason that it was closest to Ulster. The counties around Edinburgh (the Lothians and Berwick) came next in order, while a much smaller contingent came from the district lying between Aberdeen and Inverness in the northeast. [2]
The “Plantation” of Ulster proved to be a real economic success. Prior to the Protestant migration, Ireland had been a very poor, primitive country. However, after a century of Protestant ascendancy, much of Ireland, particularly Ulster, had become economically prosperous. Since the Irish had never practiced large-scale agriculture, the Scots found that the land was richer and easier to farm than their old barren homeland, and their crops thrived in the virgin soil of Ireland. From the English colonists they learned more advanced farming methods and were able to achieve crop yields they could never have dreamed of in Scotland. As they had done in their homeland, the Ulster Scots began raising sheep, and they soon developed a thriving wool industry. Later, flax was introduced from Holland, and it developed into a highly profitable industry as well.
The manufacture of linen cloth from locally grown flax was well established in the north of Ireland by the mid eighteenth century. It operated as a domestic industry, which meant that much of the spinning and most of the weaving was done in the homes of the cottiers and small farmers.
Many homes throughout the Ulster countryside were therefore dual-purpose dwellings. In such homes a room was laid aside for the handloom on which to weave linen. It was here that the man of the house would spend the long evenings weaving, while his wife spun the flax fibres into yarn and his children carded and combed the flax in preparation for the spinning wheel. Weavers’ cottages had to be clean and well lit because linen was easily spoiled by soot.
This particular cottage, a replica of a weaver’s house, has three rooms. The middle room houses the handloom. There is only one bedroom hence the need for the settle bed in the kitchen for children or an elderly relative to sleep in.
Indeed, the agricultural and woolen/linen successes were so great that the English Parliament began to grow alarmed by the competition of Irish goods with English ones and to impose restrictive measures that caused great distress in Ulster. [3]
Accordingly laws were passed to protect English trade at Irish expense. Compounding the plight of the Ulster Protestants, in addition to economic pressures, the High Church Tories came to power with the succession of Queen Ann (1703) to the Throne. The so-called “Test Act” was passed which, although stated to be directed at Roman Catholics, also adversely affected the adherents of the Presbyterian Faith as well. As most of the Scotch-Irish were Presbyterians, they felt that they were being severely persecuted by the English from both the economic and religious standpoints.
Further, droughts and hard winters caused crops to fail, and economic pressure from England effectively killed the highly competitive Ulster wool industry. These problems resulted in several migrations of Ulster Scots back to Scotland in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Then, during the second and third decades of the eighteenth century, the Ulster tenants’ leases began to expire, and their landlords began raising the rents, doubling or even tripling the amounts of the original thirty-one year leases. For many of the Ulster colonists, this was the last straw. Once more they began leaving the Ulster Plantation, but this time instead of returning to Scotland or England, they looked toward the British colonies in North America. It was during this time that we see the Rice ancestors come to Colonial America.
In the 1700’s, the colonies of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas were mostly uninhabited by Europeans except along the Atlantic coast. The British governors of these colonies began to actively solicit settlers from all over Europe, and they found many of the families in northern Ireland ready to leave Ulster for the New World. By settling these immigrants along their western frontiers, the colonial governments hoped to increase the productivity of their colonies and provide a buffer against the hostile Indians who still inhabited the Appalachian “wilderness.” Our Scots-Irish ancestors came from Pennsylvania to North Carolina (Houston, Simonton, McKee, Fleming).
Example of type of boat that brought Scots-Irish immigrants to the colonies.
Life on the Frontier (Note: this information would apply to all of our UK ancestors, including English and Welsh):
Most of the pioneers who settled the American frontier in the 1700s made their living by subsistence farming. Eventually small towns sprang up, and ministers, blacksmiths, merchants, clerks, and other professionals soon followed. But the frontier farmer still found it necessary to be as self-sufficient as possible, and the farms in those days were miniature colonies where all manner of industries were practiced. While both men and women wore clothing made of homespun material (or store-bought if they could get it), the men of the frontier families tended to adopt the dress of the Indians for working and hunting. From deerskins the pioneers would make fringed leather jackets, breeches, leggings, and moccasins, which became the daily uniform of the frontiersman. Money was scarce on the frontier, and store-bought goods were very expensive. The settlers manufactured everything they possibly could, but sooner or later they were forced to borrow money or to purchase items on credit. [6]
The typical house on the Appalachian frontier in the 1700s was the log cabin or log house. The log cabin was introduced by Finnish and Swedish settlers around 1638 in New Sweden, on the banks of the Delaware River. The early Nordic version of the log cabin generally had only a single door, facing south to let the sun in. The Scotch-Irish modified this design to incorporate two doors facing east and west, located directly across from each other for cross ventilation. Many of these early log houses included an upstairs room where the family slept. Windows were few, but frontier homes often featured small openings in the walls called “loopholes” from which guns could be fired for defense. The frontier settlements were always located close to springs or creeks so that fresh water was readily available for drinking and cooking, although bathing was an infrequent luxury at best. Homes were heated by fireplaces, with the chimney and the fireplace generally at one end of the house. Cooking was done in iron pots suspended over the fire, and lighting was provided by candles or oil lamps. Most of the furniture was homemade, consisting of a table of hewn planks, plain benches and a few chests. The bedstead was usually a rough frame supporting a straw mattress. [7]
The frontier settlers grew a variety of crops, some of which they brought from Europe and some of which were native to America. Grains like wheat, oats and rye were very popular, and mills where these grains could be processed became important early industries. One of the most important crops for the pioneer farmers was “Indian corn” or maize, which they adopted from the Native Americans. It was was easy to dry and store, could be eaten by humans and most farm animals, and could be ground into meal to make bread and cakes. It could also be fermented into whiskey, a drink which the Scotch-Irish were long accustomed to both in Scotland and Ireland. Not only was whiskey easy to manufacture and store, but it was also easily marketable and quickly became an alternative to cash on the American frontier. Corn whiskey was the most popular drink at social gatherings and in the home, and even ministers engaged in its distillation and use. The settlers also quickly found that fruit trees like apple, peach, pear and plum thrived on the southern frontier. Not only could these fruits be eaten but they could be easily fermented into brandy, which soon became second only to corn whiskey in popularity on the frontier. [8]
Money in the colonies: Prior to the completion of independence in the 1800s, America consisted of hundreds of individual economies ranging from small villages to large groups of merchants—the latter with close connections to the economies of Europe. Being quite limited in scope, most of these systems operated independently of each other and experienced minimal, if any, influence from the outside world. Each set values and prices had a basis in the local conditions. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Americans had a difficult time finding hard money.[3] The economic policies of England prevented the exportation of coins from England and did not allow the colonies to mint their own. People also used paper money, barter, wampum, and commodities like corn, wheat, tobacco, or furs that a local economy accepted as legal tender. Because the value of these other forms of money had little consistency to them, colonists took to using coins from other countries including several Spanish and Portuguese coins, the French louis d’or (“French guinea”); the Dutch rijksdallder, German reichsthaler, and Danish rigsdaler (all called the “rixdaller”); and the Dutch leeuwendaalder (the “lion dollar” or “dog dollar”). https://allthingsliberty.com/2016/09/dollar-revolutionary-america/
Hunting was also a universal method of providing food for the family. Game and fowl abounded in the forests of the Appalachians and the Piedmont, and the early frontier hunters found buffalo, elk, deer and bear plentiful. The fields and pastures were filled with wild turkey and quail, and the rivers and creeks teemed with beaver, otter and muskrats as well as a variety of edible fish. The forests and mountains were also home to predators like mountain lions, wildcats and wolves, and every home included some type of weapon for protection. The weapons of choice along the frontier were the knife, the tomahawk, and the highly-accurate flintlock rifle. While the standard military weapon of the day was the smooth-bore flintlock musket, the musket was too inaccurate for game hunting, although it could be used as a “fowler” or shotgun when loaded with multiple shots. The American rifled flintlocks were originally developed by German and Swiss settlers in Pennsylvania in the early 1700s, and by 1732 they were being manufactured commercially there. Based on earlier European hunting rifles, they were modified by the gunsmiths in the colonies to suit the needs of the American hunters. The barrels were longer and more accurate, and they were more rugged than their European counterparts. The front sights were blade-type or bead-type, while the rear sights were notch-type. Although originally developed in Pennsylvania, these weapons eventually became known as “Kentucky rifles” because of their extensive use by eighteenth-century hunters in the area between the Cumberlands and the Mississippi River known as Kentucky. Describing the accuracy of these excellent rifles, we are told that in the colonial days the favorite target for militia practice was the head of a tack at 20 yards, the head of a turkey at 60 to 100 yards, and the body of the turkey at 200 yards; at 400 yards these rifles could regularly hit an object the size of a horse. [9]
The Ulster colonists who migrated to North America were proud of their Scottish heritage and still considered themselves to be Scots, even after spending several generations in Ireland. Upon their arrival in America, they were dismayed to find that the English colonists referred to them simply as “Irish,” and made no distinction between the Protestant inhabitants of Ulster and the Catholic inhabitants of the rest of Ireland. This offended the Ulster immigrants, and they began to use the term “Scotch-Irish” to distinguish themselves from the native Irish. [5]
They retained the characteristic traits of their native stock but borrowed some things from their Irish neighbors. Their religious principles swayed their political opinions; and in maintaining their forms of worship and their creed they learned the rudiments of republicanism before they emigrated to America. They demanded and exercised the privilege of choosing their ministers and spiritual directors, in opposition to all efforts to make the choice and support of the clergy a state/governmental concern.
After emigrating to America, they maintained, in all the provinces where they settled, the right of all men to choose their own religious teachers, and to support them in the way each society of Christians might choose, irrespective of the laws –and also to use what forms of worship they might judge expedient and proper. From maintaining the rights of conscience in both hemispheres, and claiming to be governed by the laws under legitimate sovereigns in Europe they came in America to demand the same extended rights in politics as in conscience; that rulers should be chosen by the people to be governed, and should exercise their authority according to the laws the people approved. In Europe they contended for a limited monarchy through all the troubles of the seventeenth century; in America their descendants defined what a limited monarchy meant, found it to signify rulers chosen by the people for a limited time and with limited powers; and declared themselves independent of the British crown.
Footnotes
- Michael C. Scoggins, Scotch-Irish on the American Frontier, York County Culture and Heritage Commission, 2003, page 1.
- James G. Leyburn,The Scotch-Irish A Social History (1962), page 94.
- Leyburn, pages 157-158.
- Leyburn, page 157.
- Scoggins, page 2.
- Scoggins, pages 4-5.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.