Give at Dunboe, April 9, The preaching of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian ministers was not milk-and-water theology or abstract philosophical discourses. That the Puritan faith of the Scotch-Irish survived on into the 20th century and even in some communities of the Cumberlands and the Ozarks today is attested by many observers.
Other denominations thrived among the highlanders. Doubtless many faithful worshippers of that church and the Methodist, Baptist, and other evangelical groups are unaware that their forbears were predominantly Presbyterians. One of the most characteristic traits of these people is a parsimony with words and emotions.
Not that they are at a loss for words to express themselves. When an Ozarker tells his wife that he is "plumb bodaciously burnt out on these vittles " he leaves her in no doubt that he is demanding a change in menus. Or, when, he describes an angry neighbor as "all swelled up like a pizened pup" his simile carries more impact than a string of Latinized adjectives.
But the Scotch-Irish have ever been economical in their use of language. This faculty for salty and concise understatement is not the only respect in which they resemble the Yankee. The fact that the Scotch-Irish are in part Northern English, and that the old-time settlers in New England were strongly derived from the counties of Yorkshire, Cumberland and Northumberland, suggests a kinship with the pioneers who came West by way of Ulster. The Scotch-Irish lineage was well exemplified in Davy Crockett.
When the first popularizer of the coonskin cap was running for Congress in Tennessee he was to debate the issues at a backwoods picnic with his opponent. The latter, a great spellbinder in the region, held forth learnedly on the tariff and the national bank. Crockett knew little or nothing about either subject, but he was in no wise disconcerted.
When it came his turn to speak, he made a few friendly remarks, then asked his all-male audience if they would like to wet their whistles. Their response was said to have been a spontaneous and cordial Yes.
It was Crockett who won the election. The hillmen have long been known to hold in silent contempt that sort of person who is said in immemorial metaphor to wear his heart on his sleeve.
They want no kissing and dear-ing and honey-ing and back-slapping in public. A Missouri boy from one of the back southern-border counties had been away for three years campaigning in the South Pacific. They spoke through their eyes and hearts. In view of what has been said, the last distinguishing merit of the Scotch-Irish to be considered may read like paradox. This is their zeal for education.
While fighting the Irish and later the Indians, and at the same time carrying on a continuous battle with an unkind Nature in their native hills, they found time to pursue the life of the mind.
John Fiske says that at the beginning of the 18th century Ulster probably had a lower percentage of illiteracy than anywhere else in the world. A petition to one of the colonial governors in America asking for advice about emigrating was signed by men.
Only 13 had to make their mark. Macaulay says they spoke English with remarkable purity. Authorities such as H. Mencken and Vance Randolph have pointed out that the native dwellers in the Appalachians and the Ozarks speak the language in purer locutions than many Londoners or Bostonians. Shakespeare is their witness. The Scots-Irish were notably fierce and proud people.
The English immigrants that had come before them all came from generally higher social ranks and were somewhat turned-off at the confidence and pride the Scots-Irish possessed. They quickly moved inland, mostly settling along rivers and claiming the land as they went.
The primary settlers of this area, the Quakers , were generally overwhelmed by the numbers and culture of these newcomers. The Quakers happily encouraged the Scots-Irish to move westward.
Not only did they want to get rid of these unfamiliar people, they saw a strategic benefit - the Scots-Irish acted as a buffer between them and the more established settlements and indigenous tribes. So the Scot-Irish, America's first frontiersmen, initially settled in the Appalachian mountains, but they continued to push westward in the decades that followed.
These tough settlers constantly battled native American Indians and settled harsh terrain. One very tangible contribution of the Scots-Irish to American culture is one of the most distinct regional accents. What is known today as the 'southern highland accent' - common to the Mississippi Valley, Texas, and the Southern Plains - was originally known as 'Scots-Irish speech'.
More than just the accent can be traced back to the way the Scots-Irish spoke. The famous or infamous, depending on who you ask double negative ' I ain't got none' was unique to this group, as is vocabulary now typically thought of as Southern such as ' fixin' , ' lettin' on' , or ' scoot'. But the way of speaking clearly descended from dialects in Northern England that were commonly spoken in Ireland and the borderlands.
These snippets are really just the tip of the iceberg - the Scots-Irish have a deep, proud, and influential history as a people. The Gaelic place names and surnames that can be found on both sides of the North Channel including in the Lowlands are good evidence of those ties e.
In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance period, the English started a number of Plantations, or colonisation projects, in Ireland, in places such as Dublin and Ulster. The Plantation of Ulster was started in the 16th Century under the English, and originally had little or no Scottish involvement.
This changed when the Stuart King James VI of Scotland ascended to the English throne, and united the crowns of England and Scotland in Scotland retained its own government until The origins of modern Scots-Irish are generally taken to be from the Scottish Planters who came over in the early 17th century, and a subsequent migration in the early 18th century.
The bulk of the settlers came from southern Scotland, especially those parts closest to Ireland such as Galloway and Ayrshire. A more significant party came from the Scottish Borders, which had been an unruly and violent area for centuries. The Border Clans had been a nuisance to the kings of both England and Scotland and had caused international incidents between the two. King James decided to try and kill two birds with one stone, by moving many of the unruly Borderers away from their homeland, and to hold down Ulster.
Hence, Borderers were a major contingent of the Planters, and this is reflected in many surnames. However, despite their name, the Ulster Scots are not entirely of Scottish origin.
Often surnames are a giveaway. An increasingly voluminous flow of Irish Catholics to the United States from the s on accompanied the increasing exclusivity of an Irish identity as the preserve of Irish Catholics.
Although increasing cleavage between Protestant and Catholic Irish-Americans was evident from the s it was the mass migration of relatively poorer Catholic immigrants during the Famine decade which decisively compounded separation.
This gravestone from Raloo parish, near Larne, County Antrim, illustrates the impact of famine in early eighteenth-century Ulster. Patrick Fitzgerald. In an era of increasing nativist reaction, Protestant Americans of Irish origin had fresh incentive to cultivate an ethnic identity that stressed disassociation from an Irish-American Catholic entity. In the Scotch-Irish Society of America was organised and its annual congresses sought to popularise the expression Scotch-Irish as the appropriate designation for those who traced their lineage back to the Ulster Presbyterian immigrants.
The fact that large numbers of those immigrants and their offspring, particularly in the American south, had left the Presbyterian church for other evangelical Protestant denominations such as the Baptists and Methodists served to muddy the waters further. In the American-Irish Historical Society met for the first time in Boston and over the next decade and a half the interwoven threads of two centuries of emigration from Ireland to America were consciously unpicked and disentangled.
Was it, one wonders, entirely coincidental that at the same time back in Ireland, Nationalist and Unionist increasingly squared up to each other over the thorny issue of Home Rule? The standard work on the subject remains Robert. Whilst Dickson was well aware of the explicit subjectivity of much of the historiography and fully acknowledged that emigration from Ulster was not homogeneously Presbyterian, his work remains tightly focused upon the emigrant flow from Ulster ports alone.
Two more recent publications have widened the frame within which eighteenth century emigration from Ulster or Ireland can be considered.
One of the interesting insights provided by Horn is the potential for future comparative analysis of migration patterns from early modern Ireland and Scotland. In much of what has been written about the Scotch-Irish there is surprisingly little reference to those who had come to America directly from Scotland.
In relation to the issue of distinctive patterns of emigration from Ulster her conclusions are interesting. The most important difference between emigrants from Ulster ports and those from ports elsewhere in Ireland, was the greater extent to which the former travelled as paying passengers rather than indentured servants and left as family groups rather than as individuals who were predominantly male.
This is clearly an important point and has obvious implications in relation to settlement and integration in colonial America.
At the same time, however, direct comparison with contemporary German emigration reveals characteristics that were more similar than different between Irish emigrants from north or south. Set against the German experience, Wokeck concludes that Irish emigrants as a whole had easier access to trade, communications and transportation channels to carry them across the Atlantic.
Furthermore there was interconnection between Irish ports in terms of trade and a proportion of those ships that left Ulster ports called into southern ports, very likely gaining passengers in the process. A strong commercial relationship existed between Ulster and the capital city and it may be more than coincidence that the subsistence crisis of the later s, which was most intensely felt in the north, also saw very substantial emigration through Dublin.
It may be hoped that further work of a comparative nature will improve our appreciation of the similarity and difference that characterised migration from different regions within Ireland and between emigration from this island, and other parts of Europe.
As research, publication and debate proceed the challenge of overhauling the terminology of the nineteenth century may, in the twenty-first, be realised. Canny ed. Marshall ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. II Oxford
0コメント