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From Ulster to the New World
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11248 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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5 / 1986 |
6,282 Words |
| Author
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Richard K. MacMaster
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President Woodrow Wilson once told an audience, half seriously, half in jest, that "no one who amounts to anything is without some Scotch-Irish blood." An American historian, Wilson knew of the widespread settlement of the Scotch-Irish, or Ulster Scots, in the New World. They had so many descendants that any American audience was sure to include many people with at least one Scotch-Irish ancestor. He was also well aware of his own heritage as his grandfather was born in Country Tyrone in Northern Ireland.
Wilson was one of five American presidents with immediate ties to Ulster, the northern province of Ireland. Andrew Jackson's parents left there shortly before he was born. James Buchanan's father came from Derioran in Country Tyrone. Chester Arthur's father was born in a farmhouse which still stands in Cullybackey, County Antrim, and Grover Cleveland's grandfather also came from County Antrim. Ten other U.S. presidents, including Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, could claim a more distant Ulster Scot heritage.
In fact, most Americans and Canadians can find an Ulster Scot on the branches of the family tree, even though they may identify themselves more with a different ethnic heritage. As Professor James Leyburn wrote in The Scotch-Irish: A Social History, Millions of Americans have Scotch-Irish ancestors, for when this country gained its independence at least one of every ten or fifteen Americans was Scotch-Irish. Already these recent newcomers had begun to intermarry with their neighbors, in a way that was to become characteristically American, with no particular concern about whether they were descended from Scots or Englishmen or any other national groups.
Colonists from Ulster settled all along the Atlantic seaboard, from Nova Scotia to Georgia, in the eighteenth century. The largest numbers settled in Pennsylvania and the southern colonies. They made up only a small percentage of the population of New England, but the proportion increased in the south and west. Forrest and Ellen Shapiro McDonald argued persuasively in an article published in The William and Mary Quarterly in 1980 that, given the large number of persons known to have emigrated from Ulster in the eighteenth century and the much smaller known migrations directly from the lowlands and highlands of Scotland… a large proportion, possibly the vast majority of those identified as Scots, as well as those identified as Irish, made their passage to America by way of Ulster.
The McDonalds found that by 1790 descendants of this Celtic strain constituted 11 percent of the population in the states south of Pennsylvania. That was not the whole story. They also observed that Ulster Scots made up an overwhelming majority of settlers in many western counties of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina: Ethnicity was not only polarized on a north-south axis but tended to be polarized on an east-west, or more properly a tidewater-backcountry axis as well.
Ulster Scots followed the westward-moving frontier so closely that "Scotch-Irish" and "frontiersman" are almost synonymous terms in American history textbooks. Pioneers from Ulster and their children moved on to Ohio and Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, Texas and Missouri.
Immigration from the north of Ireland continued after the colonies won their independence. The
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