1717-18. This first movement, so significant as a path-opener, had
as its immediate cause the years of drought; but it was the opinion of
Archbishop King and Dean Swift that not even the dire effects of bad crops and
high prices would have been enough to make the people move if they had not had
the added goad of rack-renting*, still such a novel practice that it caused
intense resentment. In a letter of 1718 to the Archbishop of Canterbury, King
summed up the causes and tried to persuade his colleague to use his influence
to arouse the English conscience to a realization of the effects of what was
happening. He charged: "I find likewise that your Parliament is
destroying the little Trade that is left us. These & other Discouragements
are driving away the few Protestants that are amongst us. ...No Papists stir
except young men that go abroad to be trained to arms, with intention to
return with the Pretender. The Papists being already five or six to one, &
a breeding People, you may imagine in what conditions we are like to be."
. . .
In a sense, the emigrants of 1717 would be explorers whose
report on their experiences could guide those who came after. The Ulstermen
who went to Boston found unexpected difficulties and a welcome that lacked
warmth. Those who followed them in the next two years were made to understand
that they were not at all welcome. The people who entered America by the
Delaware River, on the other hand, found a land of the heart's desire. Their
enthusiastic praise of Pennsylvania persuaded others to follow them, and then
still others, until by 1720 "to go to America" meant, for most
emigrants from Ulster, to take ship for the Delaware River ports and then head
west. For the entire fifty-eight years of the Great Migration, the large
majority of Scotch-Irish made their entry to America through Philadelphia or
Chester or New Castle.
*Rack-rent was simply raising the rent on the land after the period
of the lease had expired, and renting to the highest bidder. Lease terms in
Ulster were usually 31 years, much longer than they had been in Scotland, and
were reasonable in the 17th century. As more and more immigrants came in and
land became scarce landlords could get more for use of their land. However,
the disposessed, who had been there for a generation or two, were outraged.
1725-29. The second wave was so large that not merely the friends of
Ireland but even the English Parliament became concerned. Parliament appointed
a commission to investigate the causes of the departures, for they had reached
proportions that portended a loss of the entire Protestant element in Ulster.
Letters from immigrants themselves spoke of rack-rents as a
determining cause of this second wave; but the Pennsylvania Gazette mentioned
these as only one of the "unhappy Circumstances of the Common People of
Ireland" that had resulted in so great an exodus. An article in that
journal (November 20, 1729) reported "that Poverty, Wretchedness, Misery
and Want are become almost universal among them; that . . . there is not Corn
enough rais'd for their Subsistence one Year with another; and at the same
Time the Trade and Manufactures of the Nation being cramp'd and discourag'd,
the labouring People have little to do, and consequently are not able to
purchase Bread at its present Rate; That the Taxes are nevertheless exceeding
heavy, and Money very scarce; and add to all this, that their griping,
avaricious Landlords exercise over them the most merciless Racking Tyranny and
Oppression. Hence it is that such Swarms of them are driven over into
America."
1740-41. Famine struck Ireland in 1740* and was certainly the
principal occasion for the third large wave, which included numbers of
substantial Ulstermen. An estimated 400,000 persons died in Ireland during
1740-41; for the next decade there was a tremendous exodus to America.
This third wave marked, on the American side, the first movement of
Scotch-Irish in any numbers beyond the confines of generous Pennsylvania to
the southwest. Following the path through the Great Valley, many Ulstermen now
went into the rich Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, whose southern extremity
opens out toward North and South Carolina. Arthur Young, writing in 1779,
estimated that between 1728 and 1750 Ulster lost a quarter of her trading cash
and probably a quarter of her population that had been engaged in manufacture.
His comment, if accurate, suggests the caliber of men now leaving the country.
*Not to be confused with the potato crop failure that was the cause
of the great Catholic Irish migration in 1845-47.
1754-55. The fourth exodus had two major causes; effective
propaganda from America and calamitous drought in Ulster. A succession of
governors of North Carolina had made a special effort to attract to that
province colonists from Ulster and from Scotland. That two of these officials
were themselves Ulstermen lent persuasiveness to their invitation and appeal.
As drought ravaged the countryside, testimony of Scotch-Irish success in
American struck a particularly responsive chord in hearts back home. ...
At this moment, however, the Scotch-Irish pioneers had
their first taste of real trouble with the Indians. The French and Indian wars
broke out in the colonies and were to last for more than seven years. For the
time being, these violent disturbances effectively dried up the source of new
immigration. More than this, Ulster was just now undergoing a true economic
recovery. Her prosperity was so pronounced that the vacuum left by emigrants
began to be filled by arrivals of people from the south of Ireland and from
Scotland. Her population began to increase apace; indeed, it was the pressure
of numbers, combined with a new economic depression, that caused the final
large wave of migration.
1771-75. Young, writing in 1779, when the outbreak of the American
Revolutionary War had eliminated the possibility of further emigration, said
that the people of Ulster had by 1770 become very poor, living chiefly
"on potatoes and milk and oat bread," and that their little farms
had been divided and subdivided until "the portions were so small they
cannot live on them." More than this, the shipowners at the ports of
Belfast and Derry were in distress because their "passage trade, as it
was called," which had long been a regular branch of commerce, was now
cut off.
There was, however, a special reason for the departure of
this final wave. In 1771, when the leases on the large estate of the Marquis
of Donegal in county Antrim expired, the rents were so greatly advanced that
scores of tenants could not comply with the demands and so were evicted from
farms their families had long occupied. This aroused a spirit of resentment so
intense that an immediate and extensive emigration was the consequence. During
the next three years nearly a hundred vessels sailed from the ports in the
North of Ireland, "carrying as many as 25,000 passengers, all
Presbyterian." Froude gives an even larger figure: "In the two years
which followed the Antrim evictions, thirty thousand Protestants left Ulster.
...
Throughout the fifty-eight years of the Great Migration, religious liberty
had been a motive only at the beginning. It is nevertheless significant, both
for Ireland and America, that those who left Ulster were almost all
Presbyterians. Members of the Established Church rarely went, nor did Roman
Catholic Irishmen. ...
All of the thirteen original American colonies received Scotch-Irish
settlers. By comparison with the main stream that flowed through Pennsylvania,
the Valley of Virginia, and the Carolina Piedmont, however, Scotch-Irish
settlement in other colonies was insignificant in numbers. The strength of
Presbyterianism in many of the colonies (New Jersey, for example) was not, as
might be supposed, evidence of Scotch-Irish settlement, on the contrary, most
of these churches had been founded by English and Welsh Presbyterians and many
by immigrants directly from Scotland.
A clear distinction should be made at this point between colonists from
Scotland and those from Ulster, for the two have often, to the complete
distortion of events, been thought identical. It has already been noted that
by 1717 Scots and Ulstermen were two different nationalities. Extensive
emigration from Scotland to America occurred during the eighteenth century,
possibly a fourth or a fifth as large as that from Ulster; but the reasons for
Scottish emigration were distinct. Before the union of the two Crowns in 1707,
many Scots were exiled as criminals and many more came as indentured servants
or as merchants to America. After the Union, since Scots had equal rights with
Englishmen, including the right of moving to the colonies, thousands came over
to escape the grinding poverty at home. Defeat of the Highlanders in 1746,
after the collapse of the Stuart cause, with the determination of the
government to "civilize" these people, caused a large exodus; and
the enclosure of lands, the dispossession of tenants, and the consequent
dissolution of ties of personal loyalty binding man to chief, sent thousands
of others to America. The pull from the colonies was, as usual, the
opportunity for a better life. At times during the nineteenth century there
came to be a positive "rage for emigration" throughout both Lowlands
and Highlands.
Scots in America from the first showed traits clearly different from those
of the Scotch-Irish. Scots were seldom explorers, Indian fighters, or frontier
traders; they played only a minor role as pioneers, preferring to settle in
the east and to carry on business enterprises. Their greatest difference from
their Ulster cousins, however, was seen at the time of the American
Revolution: whereas the Scotch-Irish were usually ardent patriots and notable
fighters in the cause of the colonies, the Scots were, with notable
exceptions, Loyalists faithful to the Crown. Only in their Presbyterianism and
a few of their traits of personality did they resemble the Scotch-Irish. In
North Carolina the Highland Scots for a long while retained their Gaelic
language and even their Highland dress.
Children and grandchildren of the original Scotch-Irish settlers in America
were always among the leaders in the move to the new West; but they were no
longer Scotch-Irish in their social characteristics and outlook. Just as they
were likely to become Methodists and Baptists instead of remaining
Presbyterians, so they were likely to marry persons whose background may have
been English or German. The memory of Ulster and its respectabilities and
distinctions meant little or nothing to these constant pioneers. They were
Americans.
[The Scotch-Irish] moved immediately upon arrival to a region where there
was neither a settlement nor an established culture. He held land, knew
independence, had manifold responsibilities from the very outset. He spoke the
language of his neighbors to the East through whose communities he had passed
on his way to the frontier. Their institutions and standards differed at only
minor points from his own. The Scotch-Irish were not, in short, a
"minority group" and needed no Immigrant Aid society to tide them
over a period of maladjustment so that they might become assimilated in the
American melting pot. Like all people, whether immigrants or stay-at-homes,
they must have known individual discouragement and disappointment; some may
even have had a heightened feeling of inner lonliness, a quality of mind Weber
attributes to most Calvinists who reflect upon the implications of the
doctrine of predestinatiion. But to the extent that their neighbors shared
similar experiences and attitudes, without pressure from other Americans to be
different, the Scotch-Irish were not ... marginal men. They were, on the
contrary, full Americans almost from the moment they took up their farms in
the back-country.