20 Facts About Scotch-Irish Americans

Scotch-Irish Americans are American descendants of Ulster Protestants who emigrated from Ulster in northern Ireland to America during the 18th and 19th centuries, whose ancestors had originally migrated to Ireland mainly from the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England in the 17th century.

Term Scotch-Irish Americans is used primarily in the United States, with people in Great Britain or Ireland who are of a similar ancestry identifying as Ulster Scots people.

Scotch-Irish Americans, according to James Leyburn, "is an Americanism, generally unknown in Scotland and Ireland, and rarely used by British historians".

The term is somewhat ambiguous because some of the Scotch-Irish Americans have little or no Scottish ancestry at all: numerous dissenter families had been transplanted to Ulster from northern England, in particular the border counties of Northumberland and Cumberland.

Scotch-Irish Americans describes them as being quite different from Gaelic-speaking groups such as the Scottish Highlanders or Irish.

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The Scotch-Irish Americans radiated westward across the Alleghenies, as well as into Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

Scotch-Irish Americans moved up the Delaware River to Bucks County, and then up the Susquehanna and Cumberland valleys, finding flat lands along the rivers and creeks to set up their log cabins, their grist mills, and their Presbyterian churches.

Scotch-Irish Americans settled the frontier of Pennsylvania and western Virginia, they were in the midst of the French and Indian War and Pontiac's Rebellion that followed.

The Scotch-Irish Americans were frequently in conflict with the Indian tribes who lived on the other side of the frontier; indeed, they did most of the Indian fighting on the American frontier from New Hampshire to the Carolinas.

Especially in Pennsylvania, whose pacifist Quaker leaders had made no provision for a militia, Scotch-Irish settlements were frequently destroyed and the settlers killed, captured or forced to flee after attacks by Native Americans from tribes of the Delaware, Shawnee, Seneca, and others of western Pennsylvania and the Ohio country.

In contrast to the Scottish Highlanders, the Scotch-Irish Americans were generally ardent supporters of American independence from Britain in the 1770s.

Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, with its large Scotch-Irish Americans population, was to make the first declaration for independence from Britain in the Mecklenburg Declaration of 1775.

Scotch-Irish Americans concludes that the leadership of the iron and steel industry nationwide was "largely Scotch-Irish".

Ingham finds that the Scotch-Irish Americans held together cohesively throughout the 19th century and "developed their own sense of uniqueness".

Border origin of the Scotch-Irish Americans is supported by study of the traditional music and folklore of the Appalachian Mountains, settled primarily by the Scotch-Irish Americans in the 18th century.

Scotch-Irish Americans immigrants brought it over in the 18th century and it became a common floor plan in Tennessee, Kentucky, and elsewhere.

Vann shows the Scotch-Irish Americans played a major role in defining the Bible Belt in the Upper South in the 18th century.

Scotch-Irish Americans emphasizes the high educational standards they sought, their "geotheological thought worlds" brought from the old country, and their political independence that was transferred to frontier religion.

In 1746, the Scotch-Irish Americans Presbyterians created the College of New Jersey, later renamed Princeton University.

The Associate Reformed Synod of the West maintained the characteristics of an immigrant church with Scotch-Irish Americans roots, emphasized the Westminster standards, used only the psalms in public worship, was Sabbatarian, and was strongly abolitionist and anti-Catholic.