The earliest surviving court and land grant records reveal modest numbers of distinctively Scottish names. Numbering some men, women, and children, the group was led by Highland gentry who provided much of the financing for the venture and received the largest grants of land.
Gabriel Johnston , a Lowland Scot and North Carolina governor from to , was accused of showing favoritism to his compatriots, and the General Assembly exempted the newcomers from taxation for ten years after their arrival. The second large wave of Highland immigrants began in the late s and reached its peak in It is not known exactly how many Highlanders came to North Carolina, but in James Knox estimated that 20, Highlanders migrated to America during this second wave.
Most of the Highlanders who came as part of the second wave settled in the Upper Cape Fear region that includes modern-day Cumberland , Harnett , Hoke , and Moore Counties. Many Highlanders lived in the rural areas on the roads leading to the town of Cross Creek later Fayetteville , which was chartered by the General Assembly in The abundance of pine trees in the Sandhills enabled these settlers to make their living in naval stores , extracting the sap and processing it into tar, pitch, and turpentine, which they sent down the Cape Fear River to Wilmington on flatboats made of logs.
Many Highlanders were also small farmers growing crops and raising horses, cattle, and hogs. Other individuals and families found their way directly from the Scottish Highlands to North Carolina during the remainder of the colonial era, mainly through the ports of Brunswick and Wilmington.
The colony, in fact, came to be extolled as "the best poor man's country" as promotional tracts and letters home praised its climate and soil and the ease with which land could be acquired. Lowland Scots also immigrated individually or in small groups to North Carolina and other colonies throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because Lowland Scots were widely dispersed and more readily assimilated in the colonies, their story is less easily told than that of their Highland compatriots.
While there were far fewer Lowland Scots than Highland Scots in North Carolina, some Lowlanders filled important roles as merchants, high-ranking officials, or military officers. Others ranged from poor immigrants and indentured servants to well-educated teachers, physicians, and clergymen.
The migration of Scotch-Irish settlers to America began in the s but did not occur in large numbers until the s. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the native aristocracy of Ulster had rebelled against the English government and its newly established Anglican Church. The Scotch-Irish were also the largest ethnic group among the settlers in the Carolina backcountry in the eighteenth century, and they were the largest group among the pioneers who crossed the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains and settled in southwestern North Carolina in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Although the Scottish emigrants, in coming to America, were assured freedom to exercise their Presbyterian religion at a time when the Stuart monarchy favored spreading the Anglican Church throughout the British Isles, the most important motivation for Scottish emigration was economic. Profound changes in agricultural organization following the Jacobite insurrection of raised rents to unprecedented heights and resulted in large numbers of evictions. Entire communities often emigrated, with the enterprise many times being organized by "tacksmen"-leaseholders who traditionally held long leases from the landowner and in turn rented to tenants.
Scots were also important in the religious life of the colony, being well represented among both Presbyterian and Anglican clergy. Although they suffered a bloody defeat in that contest, Scots constituted the backbone of North Carolina Loyalism throughout the war, and with the establishment of independence many of them sought refuge in the British colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
After the Revolutionary War , Scottish immigration to North Carolina gradually resumed and continued until the War of The number of immigrants who came to the state during this period is unknown, but Scottish port records of the s and the opening years of the nineteenth century list several dozen emigrant vessels clearing for North Carolina, mainly Wilmington.
After the War of , at least a trickle of immigration resumed: in , for example, a ship carrying migrants was cleared from Campbelltown to Wilmington. The U. Today, that two-way trans-Atlantic trade — in visitors, innovation, investment, business and friendship — continues.
The Scottish influence in the birth of modern America is acknowledged in Senate Resolution which declares April 6th each year to be designated and observed as Tartan Day. The resolution honours the role, 'that Scottish Americans played in the founding of the Nation'. Did you know, that of the 44 men who have served as US President, an astonishing 34 have been of either Scottish or Ulster-Scots descent? According to genealogists, even Barack Obama's ancestry can be traced back to William the Lion who ruled Scotland from to And as for that Mickey Mouse connection, the famous Walt Disney character was voiced for almost 40 years by a Scotsman from Dundee called Jimmy Macdonald.
Founding father Benjamin Franklin even visited Scotland, touring the country in Similarly, Americans harbour an affinity with Scotland, its people, history and landscape and in recent years we have welcomed more than , US visitors to Scotland. Today there are almost Scottish associations and clubs in America and, in the most recent US Census, more than 5 million Americans claimed Scottish ancestry.
Scots are relatively unscathed by any ethnic stereotyping; however, the phrase, "cold as Presbyterian charity" reflects the long standing belief that Scots are dour and stingy. This seems to be lessening, although brand names such as "Scotch Tape" reinforce the idea that to be Scottish is to be thrifty.
There is also the persistence of the "hillbilly" legend, which portrays Appalachian residents as ill-clad, unshod bumpkins fond of brewing "moon-shine" bootleg whiskey. This image became widespread with the "Lil' Abner" comic strip drawn by Al Capp beginning in ; the strip reached 60 million readers and became first a Broadway musical and then a film in The dignity of most rural Southern life has emerged, however, with the publication of the "Foxfire" books in the s, and the efforts of folklorists to preserve and document a vanishing way of life.
Appalshop, a rural arts and education center in Whitesburg, Kentucky, exemplifies the effort to preserve the Scottish and Scotch-Irish heritage of Appalachia on film and also recorded music. The figure most associated with the best aspects of this tradition is the pioneer Daniel Boone , whose life has been celebrated in song and story, as well as movies and television. Daniel Boone was a trailblazer and patriot who continues to capture the imaginations of Americans.
Other famous Scots who immigrated to America were Flora MacDonald, the woman who saved the life of "Bonnie Prince Charlie" by hiding him from his pursuers.
Imprisoned by the English until she became too troublesome as a symbol of Jacobite sentiment, she was pardoned and immigrated to North Carolina. John Muir, Scottish-born naturalist , was reared as a strict Calvinist, and reacted to a near loss of his eyesight in an accident by a spiritual quest for the natural world.
He began a walk on foot across the continent, and fiercely advocated the preservation of the wilderness; he influenced President Theodore Roosevelt to become a conservationist. The national parks are a tribute to his foresight and love of America's natural beauty. This attachment can be seen today in the celebration by Americans of their Scottish and Scotch-Irish roots, which often means both a consciousness of ethnicity as well as taking a journey to discover their ancestral heritage.
Many genealogical firms in Great Britain and Ireland specialize in helping these Americans trace their ancestry. A family crest, a tartan tie, or an interest in traditional customs is a demonstration of pride in their ethnic identity.
Scottish and Scotch-Irish customs include the shivaree an elaborate courting ritual that involves the serenading of the bride outside her window and square dancing. The square dance began with reels and other dances enjoyed by the nobility and was transformed to the present popularity of line dancing—steps done to music often featuring the most Scotch-Irish of instruments, the fiddle. Today's "Texas Two-Step" and "Boot-scooting" evolved from ancient ritual dances.
Scots enjoy large "gatherings of the clan," which celebrate their heritage and offer opportunities to meet others who share membership in the clan. Most states with a large Scottish and Scotch-Irish population such as New York and Michigan have "Highland Games," which feature sports such as "tossing the caber," in which men compete to toss a heavy pole the farthest distance.
Bagpipe music is a very important part of this celebration, as it is at any celebration of clan identity. North Carolina, which has one of largest concentrations of people of Scottish descent, hosts the biggest gathering at Grandfather Mountain each July. Campbells mingle with MacGregors and Andersons, while enjoying Scotch whisky and traditional cuisine.
Main Scottish staples are oatmeal, barley, and potatoes. Oatmeal is made into a porridge, a thick, hot breakfast cereal traditionally seasoned with salt. Barley is used primarily in the distillation of Scotch whiskey, now a major source of export revenue. Potatoes "tatties" are most often eaten mashed. There is also the traditional haggis a pudding made from the heart, liver, and other organs of a sheep, chopped with onions and oatmeal and then stuffed into a sheep's stomach and boiled.
This unique meal, served with tatties and "a wee dram" small portion of whiskey , has taken its place with the tartan and the bagpipes as a national symbol. Scots also enjoy rich vegetable soups, seafood in many forms, beef, oatcakes a tasty biscuit , and short-bread a rich, cookie-like confection. The famous Scottish kilt, a knee-length skirt of a tartan pattern, was created by an Englishman, Thomas Rawlinson, who lived in the s.
The older kilts were rectangles of cloth, hanging over the legs, gathered at the waist, and wrapped in folds around the upper body. The blanket-like garment served as a bed-roll for a night spent outdoors. Aside from the kilt, fancy "highland" dress includes a sporan leather purse on a belt , stockings, brogues shoes , dress jacket, and a number of decorative accessories.
The plaid is a length of tartan cloth draped over the shoulder and does not properly refer to the pattern, which is the tartan.
Women's fancy dress is simpler, though elegant, consisting of a white cotton blouse, perhaps with embroidered patterns, and a silk tartan skirt. Her version of the plaid, a tartan also in silk, is hung over the shoulder and pinned in place with a brooch. This finery, like the tartans, is mostly an invention of the modern age but has become traditional and it is taken quite seriously. The tartan shows up elsewhere, commonly worn on ties, caps, and skirts—even on cars and in the costumes of young "punk rockers" in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
There is considerable Scottish influence in the field of country and folk music, directly traceable to the Scots ballad—a traditional form in which a story usually tragic is related to the listener in song. The ballad e. Instruments, especially the fiddle and harp, Bagpipe music is a very important part of "Highland Games" type celebrations, as it is at any celebration of clan identity.
Most Scottish holidays are those celebrated throughout Great Britain; however, two holidays are unique to Scotland: Scottish Quarter Day, celebrated 40 days after Christmas, and the commemoration of St. Andrew, patron saint of Scotland, on November Health concerns are primarily determined by economic factors, and especially by location.
Having found, for the most part, economic security due to generations of residence and the economic advantage of an early arrival in America, many Scots and Scotch-Irish are insured through their employers, are self-employed, or have union benefits. The great exception is in Appalachia, where poverty persists despite the initiatives of John F.
Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty" in the s. The dominant industry of the area, coal mining, has left a considerable mark on the health of Scottish and Scotch-Irish Americans. Black lung, a congestive disease of the lungs caused by the inhalation of coal dust, disables and kills miners at a high rate.
This and chronic malnutrition, high infant mortality, and low birth weight remain the scourge of mountain people. West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee still have pockets of poverty as a result of high unemployment and isolation. The pattern of early marriage and large families is still typical, as is a significant problem with domestic violence. The Scotch-Irish are unlikely to share speech patterns and the characteristic burr a distinctive trilled "r" with the Scots.
However, linguists who have studied Appalachian accents have found continuity in usage and idiom that can be shown to originate in Scottish phrases. Occasionally remnants of the Scottish idiom survive in words such as "dinna" which means "don't," as in "I dinna ken" I don't know , but this is increasingly rare as even isolated mountain hollows in the South are penetrated by mass media and its homogenizing influence.
Traditional family structure, especially in the Highlands, centered around the clan. There are about 90 original clans. Many of the clan names are prefixed by "Mac," meaning "son of. The most famous feud was that between the Campbells who supported the English and the MacDonalds Jacobites. Even today there are MacDonalds who will not speak to Campbells and vice-versa.
Large clans enrolled smaller ones as allies, and the alliances also became traditional. The adjective "clannish," derived from the Gaelic clann descent from a common ancestor perfectly describes the sentimental attachment that Scottish Americans feel concerning extended family and heritage. The origin of this term is the tendency of Scots to migrate with their clan and settle in the same location.
This tendency was so pronounced that in parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, relatives adopted the use of their middle name as a surname since all their kin shared a common last name.
The murderous vendetta lasted years and involved disputes over a razorback hog, a romance between a Hatfield son and a McCoy daughter, and various other affronts to family dignity.
After nationwide publicity, the feud was finally ended in after the execution of one of the Hatfields and the jailing of several other participants. However, the phrase, "feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys" is still a part of the American vocabulary. Gatherings were purposeful and practical in frontier America, as in the "quilting bee," which allowed women to enjoy each others' company while creating a patchwork quilt—the essence of thrift.
Various small pieces of fabric were sewn together in patterns to create a beautiful and utilitarian bed covering. Today many of these quilts are treasured by the descendants of the women who made them.
Quilting is a popular craft that has enjoyed an ever-widening appreciation both as a hobby and folk art; quilts are often displayed in museums, and one of the best collections can be seen in Paducah, Kentucky, home of the American Quilting Society. Another traditional community activity is that of the barn raising and the subsequent dance—a tribute to the pioneer spirit that built America.
Neighbors cooperated to erect barns and celebrated their hard work with fiddle music and a square dance late into the night. These gatherings helped shape community in rural areas such as the Midwest and the West. The traditional dividing line between the Scotch-Irish and the Irish has been religion.
The belief in predestination of the soul had a powerful effect on the shaping of the Scots' psyche. The original plantation of Scots in Ulster, which was motivated by economic hard times as much as by politics, was an attempt by England to subdue the native Catholic population. England thereby politicized religion when it initiated the discord between the two groups, a discord that still plays itself out in Northern Ireland.
When the Potato Famine of the s caused the Scotch-Irish to migrate to the New World, they brought their faith with them, retaining a tradition that stood them in good stead in the largely Protestant country.
Although in Scotland the Church of Scotland was an austere entity, not given to large churches or displays of wealth, it gradually gave way to grand affirmations of material success in America. Today the Presbyterian church still plays a significant role in American religious life. Scots and Scotch-Irish have been drawn to the land as farmers and herders just as in their home country.
Highland Scots, in particular, were attracted to mountain areas that resembled their homeland, and replicated their lives as herders and small scale farmers wherever possible. Others were drawn to work in heavy industry, such as the steel mills and coal mines. The nation's railroads provided employment for many, and in the case of Andrew Carnegie, provided a step up in his career as a capitalist.
Many sought higher education and entered the professions at all levels, particularly as physicians and lawyers. For others, isolated in Appalachia or the rural South, hard times during the Great Depression brought scores of Scotch-Irish to the factories of Detroit and Chicago, where they labored in the auto plants and stockyards.
Poverty returned for many of these people as plants shut down and downscaled in the s, creating so-called "hillbilly ghettoes" in major Northern industrial cities. Generations of poverty have created an underclass of displaced Southerners which persists as a social problem today.
Author Harriette Arnow, born in , wrote movingly of the plight of these economic migrants in her novel The Dollmaker Scottish and Scotch-Irish Americans have, of course, assimilated to a high degree and have benefited much from the opportunities that class mobility and a strong work ethic have brought them.
Not until the s would Scottish nationalism be a significant force in British politics; nonetheless, in , Scottish voters rejected limited home rule in a referendum. There is a significant presence of Scottish nationalists today despite the historic, economic and cultural ties to Britain. Scottish and Scotch-Irish Americans have been involved with U. As landholders and farmers, they were very much the people Thomas Jefferson had in mind as participants in his agrarian democracy. From legislators to presidents, including President Bill Clinton, the passion of Scottish people for government has been felt in America.
Presidents who shared this heritage include Andrew Jackson , Ulysses S. McClellan for the Blue. Many Scots had settled on the frontier and moved westward seeking land and opportunity, and pressed forward to the West, particularly Texas, Oklahoma, and the Gulf Coast. Texas in particular was a land of opportunity for the land-hungry Scots—Sam Houston and his fellows were among the intrepid settlers of that diverse state.
They fought the Comanches and settled the Plains, creating a legend of Texan grit and determination not unlike the reputation of their Scottish forebears. Highland Scots and their descendants who typically settled in the mountains were active in the anti-slavery movement, while it was more common for the Lowland Scots and the Scotch-Irish to be proslavery.
The peak periods of Scots-Irish migration to America occurred between and Over , people came in total - far greater numbers than the Pilgrims, Puritans, and Quakers who came before them.
They didn't all come at once, but rather in waves throughout the 18th century. Nearly two-thirds are estimated to have come to America in the decade immediately before the American Revolution. The Scots-Irish weren't leaving the British Isles for religious reasons like numerous English separatist groups that preceded them. Nor were they a group of elites and their servants like the Cavaliers either.
They were the first group to immigrate to America primarily for economic opportunity. Few were wealthy, but few were totally destitute. Many were yeoman farmers or middle-class merchants that felt they were getting financially squeezed back home. The great American wilderness was far more appealing than the high rents, heavy taxes, and unfair land laws of the Crown.
Though they weren't the most destitute members of society, most Scots-Irish people were far from wealthy. Typically, they were the lowest of the ranks who could make the journey to America. After all, the passage itself costed money, which kept the poorest citizens from crossing the Atlantic. The Scots-Irish were notably fierce and proud people.
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