SCOTCH-IRISH ON
THE FRONTIER
Life in northern or Ulster, Ireland had been difficult for
the Scotch settlers for several generations. Originally recruited by the
British Crown, along with English farmers, to settle lands in northern
Ireland and to help "civilize" this country of Papists, the
Scots, or Scotch-Irish as they were to be later called, found themselves
also mistreated by the Crown. Most were farmers of sheep or flax and
nearly all were Presbyterians.
They had lived through periods of brutal religious
persecution and periods of uneasy toleration as the Established Church and
the Papists vied for control and at times even vied for the support of the
Scotch-Irish. They did not own their land, but were tenant farmers whose
taxes became heavy burdens. England controlled the wool and linen markets
and, in the early 1700s, placed severe restrictions on the Irish trade in
favor of the English markets. The situation became so intolerable that the
Scotch-Irish began leaving Ireland in large numbers from virtually every
port in northern Ireland. Many came to the New World.
Not wanting a repeat of religious persecution, most of
these newcomers avoided the northern colonial ports, with their own brand
of persecution, as well as the southern ports where the Established Church
was in power. The port of choice was Philadelphia, the entry into the
fabled land of Quaker toleration. Although religious toleration was found,
these newcomers also found that the citizens didn't want them in their
midst. The more settled citizens considered the Scotch-Irish rather
boorish and their strong intolerance of the Indians conflicted with the
more tolerant views of the Quakers.
Americans, however, welcomed the newcomers, but as
peoples to settle the frontiers and to become buffers with the Indians.
Some of the Scotch-Irish moved west into the Alleghenies, some moved south
into the Great Valley of Virginia, the Shenandoah. There they found the
Established Church of England, while powerful in the Tidewater area, had
little power on the remote side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. In fact, they
were allowed to organize their own churches and to enlist ministers
provided they organized similar to the Church of England with tithes and
vestry, and that they swore allegiance to the Crown and renounced support
of any pretenders to the throne. Even the organization along Church of
England lines was not a burden to the dissenters; the Church also
exercised civil authority and this organization was required to carry on
the local government function.
For one to understand why these Anglicans would be
called Scotch-Irish, it is first necessary to understand that the term,
"Scotch-Irish" dates from the late 1800s and not from the time
these settlers arrived in American. After living in Ireland for many
generations, these people considered themselves to be Irish as did the
Welsh and English who also had lived in Ireland for many generations. In
fact, the area around Staunton, Virginia, was, in those days, referred to
as the Irish Tract. The later Potato Famine in Ireland cause another, even
greater, flood of immigrants into America in the middle 1800s. These
people were from all over Ireland, many were Catholic, and they were
pretty well hated by the rest of the citizens of the United States. The
term, "Scotch-Irish" came into use late in the 1800s to ensure
that folks understood that those early Irish immigrants were not the same
as these newcomers. Several of the best histories of the Shenandoah Valley
were written at the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th
and they used the term "Scotch-Irish. It is a false term - the early
immigrants were just as Irish as my mother's ancestors who came from
Ireland in the middle 1800s. And several of those so-called Scotch-Irish
were more probably Welsh-Irish or English-Irish.
There are many good references to the Scotch-Irish
settlers. One highly readable account is James G. Leyburn, The
Scotch-Irish, A Social History (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1962).
CAUSES OF
MIGRATION IN COLONIAL AND POST-REVOLUTION AMERICA
Free or cheap land was the primary reason for all
migrations in the United States and its territories well into the 19th
century. Sometimes there were other factors such as the moves of Tories to
avoid persecutions by the Patriots and mass exodus from the devastated
South after the Civil War. But little movement would have occurred if this
country did not possess vast lands which could be sold or given away to
peoples whose ancestors never experienced the privilege of owning their
own land. The government had only to deal with the Indians who lived on
those lands and often they left that problem to the settlers.
The laws of primogeniture and entail would be replaced
(first by Governor Thomas Jefferson in 1776 in Virginia) with estate rules
which allocated the land more evenly with 1/3 to the wife and the
remainder to be divided equally among the sons, if the father died interstate
(without a will).
Even with more equitable estate division, later
generations would be impacted as land became more difficult to find. The
division of an estate is too often underplayed as a factor in migration.
Imagine that if one had 1,000 acres and five sons in 1780 (a likely number
at that time). Each son would get an equal 200 acres, assuming the mother
had died. Next imagine that each of these sons had five more sons. In the
third generation, about the year 1820, each son would have only 40 acres -
barely enough to subsist on and certainly not enough to become prosperous.
More land to the west was the answer.
Revolutionary soldiers were usually paid late, if at all
in the case of militia units. The promise of land bounties kept most of
them fighting. The new country would be rich in vast lands that could be
given away and the nation and individual states did so frequently. Most of
the lands given in bounty were in Tennessee (western North Carolina),
Kentucky (western Virginia), and Georgia; a few were in the Ohio Valley.
The most significant government action in promoting the
sale of lands to the west was the Northwest Ordinance of 1785. This
ordinance provided for the acquisition of lands from the Indians and the
sale of those lands to the public; the first tracts, however, went to the
military bounties promised earlier. Cheap as the land was, it was still
difficult for anyone not holding a bounty to acquire land.
The Harrison Land Act of 1800 allowed land purchases on
credit, making the western lands available to a great number of the
population. Throughout the colonial and the post-Revolution period,
speculation in western lands was rife with such notaries as George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson taking part. The boom in western lands
collapsed in 1819 and Congress dropped the credit provisions in 1820, but
by this time, most of my ancestors had moved to locations where they would
settle.
Much has been written about the settlers in the Valley
of Virginia. Perhaps one of the most popular was Theodore Roosevelt, The
Winning of the West (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1900) and an
excerpt of Chapter 5, "The Backwoodsmen of the Alleghanies." has
been reprinted (Franklin, TN: Territorial Press, 1988). An excellent
source is Joseph A. Waddell, The Annals of Augusta County, Virginia
(Staunton, VA: C. Russell Caldwell, Publisher, 1901). This one-volume work
is available at several public libraries. The most revered work (in my
belief) is Lyman Chalkley, Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish Settlement in
Virginia (1965 rpt; Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1902).
Chalkley was a judge in Augusta County and, as personal project,
abstracted courthouse records of the late 18th century in that county
(Augusta County once included all of western Virginia and what is now West
Virginia and Kentucky as well as parts of the Ohio Valley). Chalkley's
three-volume massive work is well indexed but is only for the serious
researcher since it is only a collection of records.
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