Scots-Irish Emigration to the American Backcountry
Some 250,000 Ulster Presbyterians left for America over the eighteenth century, beginning with a wave in 1718. They were the descendants of Scottish settlers planted in Ulster from 1610, and their grievances were specific rather than general. The Test Act of 1704 required officeholders to take communion in the established Church of Ireland, which excluded Presbyterians from municipal corporations, the militia and the magistracy as effectively as it excluded Catholics; their marriages were of doubtful legal standing; and they paid tithes to a church they did not attend. Then the leases fell in. Much of Ulster had been let on long leases at rents fixed a generation earlier, and when they expired around 1717 landlords raised them to the market — the practice called rack-renting — in years of poor harvests and a collapse in the linen trade. Five ships left Londonderry in 1718 with some 700 people, and a group from the Bann valley wrote to the governor of Massachusetts first to ask about land. New England received them coolly and directed them to the frontier. Most later arrivals went through Philadelphia and down the Great Wagon Road into the Appalachian back country of Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas, where they took land on the edge of settlement and fought the people already on it. They supplied a disproportionate share of the Revolution's soldiers and, later, of American presidents. The name they are known by is American. In Ireland they were simply Presbyterians or Ulster Scots, and the compound Scotch-Irish came into use in the United States in the nineteenth century, partly to distinguish them from the Catholic arrivals of the famine years.
- Year: 1710 CE
- Category: Social
