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.
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.