Volume 2, Chapter 10, The Ulster Scots
Pennsylvania, during the first half of the 18th century, was the focal center for a great wave of non-English immigration into the American colonies.
The American colonies grew with great rapidity, the total population rising from 250,000 in 1700 to almost 1,200,000 in 1750, an almost five-fold increase.
Of this rise, the bulk was caused by immigration, and the great part of this migration came from two non-English groups,
The Ulster Scots called the Scotch-Irish and the Germans. The major part of them settled in Pennsylvania.
If the total population grew fivefold between 1700 and 1750, Massachusetts and New York populations rose scarcely more than three times, the latter's meager growth reflecting its restrictive land policy.
In contrast, the population of Pennsylvania, the newest colony in 1700, rose from 18,000 to 120,000 in this period, a remarkable increase of nearly seven-fold.
Pennsylvania was now more populous than Connecticut and considerably more than New York.
This influx led to an accelerated swamping of the original Quaker element of Pennsylvania
and to increasing tension between the newcomers and the Quakers.
By the end of the colonial era, Pennsylvania was approximately one-third German and one-third Ulster-Scott.
The Ulster-Scots were the largest immigrant group in the 18th century.
These men were, in the main, intense Presbyterians from lowland Scotland, whose families had been settled in Ulster in Northern Ireland during the seventeenth century.
By the turn of the eighteenth century, England began to oppress the Ulster men. A woollen act gravely crippled the export trade of Ulster weavers,
Ulster Weavers, a test act, disenfranchised the Presbyterians, and tenants were especially
oppressed and rack-rented by absentee feudal English landlords.
The first great wave of Ulster-Scott immigration came after the agricultural failures of 1716-17,
and further great waves came in the late 1720s, the early 1740s, and the mid-1750s.
In the late 1850s, by 1776, a quarter of a million Scots had come to America from Ulster.
The Ulster Scots flooded into Pennsylvania, where newcomers were particularly welcomed
and generally found their way to the Western frontier, at that time in southeast Pennsylvania.
The bulk of the Scots, being poor, came to America as indentured servants, and after
After their term of servitude had ended, received the customary allowance of land as an incongruous
form of compensation. Most of the Ulster Scots thus became small farmers or squatters in
such areas as the Susquehanna and Cumberland Valleys. Eventually many filtered southward
down the Shenandoah Valley to become backwoods frontiersmen in Virginia and Piedmont farmers
in the Carolinas.
Quite a few Scots, however, mainly those from Scotland itself, became businessmen and tobacco
warehousemen in Virginia and Maryland.
Some Jacobite Highlanders also came to America after the unsuccessful Stuart Rebellions of
1715 and 1745, but these, too, were Presbyterians rather than Roman Catholics.
The brawling, hard-drinking Scott frontiersman, though often fur traders with the Indians,
adopted a violent, aggressive, and contemptuous course toward the natives, and tended to drive
them out of their lands.
This attitude brought them into sharp conflict with the Pacific Quakers, concerned with justice
toward the Indians.
It must be recognized, however, that the bulk of Indian-claimed land was not settled and
transformed by the Indians, and that, therefore, the Scots were at least justified in ignoring
vague abstract claims, whether by government or by Indian tribes, to the lands they knew
that they were settling. Many of the Ulster Scots were squatters on frontier land, lacking
and money to pay the prices asked by the feudal proprietary, they reasoned that they were entitled
to own virgin land that they themselves had cleared and tilled. They needed no acquaintance
with John Locke to sense that such land was their rightful property. The Pennsylvania
government tried for a long while to collect quit rants and purchase payments from the
of Squatters, but to little avail.
Several times, Provincial Secretary Richard Peters tried to dispossess squatters by arriving
with a party of officials to burn down the cabins of the settlers, only to have the squatters
rebuild the cabins and farm the land again after they had gone.
At other times, squatters fought back against government aggression.
By the mid-18th century, the Ulster Scots dominated the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia
and the upcountry Piedmont Farm region of North Carolina and South Carolina. The valley
settlers, remote at first from the seat of government authority at Williamsburg, developed
their own customary law of settlement, which granted original property rights to land on
In the basis of certain marks of settlement, these marks conferring ownership included cornright
and taking up land, earned by planting crops and building a home, tomahawk right, earned
by clearing a few trees, and cabin right, gained by building a log cabin.
These were rough criteria, usually overly generous to the individual settlers, but the
The system was an instructive example of rough justice emerging from customary law, developed
solely by the voluntary actions of the people and without the imposition of statute or decree
of the state. It might have been expected that the Ulster Scots would choose to settle
in Calvinist New England, which was closest to them in religious conviction, but subtle
The two religious differences meant a great deal to the Puritans, and they made the Presbyterians
decidedly unwelcome.
Indeed, one of the first groups of Ulster immigrants, several hundred strong, arrived
at Boston in 1718 to face a decidedly hostile reception.
Most were shunted off to Maine and ended in New Hampshire.
One group settled in the frontier town of Worcester, Massachusetts, but was promptly
persecuted by the Puritans there.
They were coerced into merging their Presbyterian church into the Puritan church and found themselves
forced to pay tithes to support their persecutors.
To the Presbyterians' petition for relief from the tax, the Worcester township denied
their right to independence from the established Puritan church.
When the Scots began to build their own church, the Puritans destroyed the building. The hapless
Scots were thus forced to move to the more remote western frontier and there founded
settlements at Warren and Blandford. Religious hatred was bolstered by ethnic feeling against
the foreign Scotch-Irish and by the fear of economic competition. Bostonians also did
did not want their taxes to be raised to pay for expected welfare and poor relief for the
influx of ulstermen. This was understandable, but it was characteristic that the Bostonians
blamed the ulstermen instead of their own law, which provided for an escalating drain
on the taxpayers for payments to any poor resident. All these factors caused a mob to
The story was the same in Connecticut. Of the original Boston group of Ulster-Scots, one part settled in Volontown, now Sterling, in northeastern Connecticut. There the Scots were confronted by an official remonstrance of the town council when they obtained their first press release.
Presbyterian Minister.
Because he is a stranger, we are informed that he came out of Ireland, and we are informed
that the Irish are not wholesome inhabitants.
New England hostility to Presbyterian newcomers was, moreover, not overcome by any great need
for more indentured servants.
By the 18th century, the greatest need for more forced labor was on large farms and plantations,
And aside from the Narragansett country, there were few such opportunities in New England,
in contrast to the Middle Atlantic and Southern colonies.
As a consequence, religious and ethnic hostility could reign unbridled, and therefore few Ulstermen
settled in New England.
Instead, they chose Pennsylvania, the great haven of religious freedom and of separation
of church and state.
As for the other Middle Atlantic colonies, New York, with its feudal land structure,
was singularly unattractive to would-be farmers. Furthermore, while there were many English
Presbyterians on Long Island, the persecution of the revered elder statesmen of Presbyterianism,
the Reverend Francis McKimney and Ulster Scott by Lord Cornbury, did not endear New York
to the Ulsterman. In late 1706, Lord Cornberry, royal governor of New York, arrested and imprisoned
McKinney for allegedly preaching without a license. Though McKinney was eventually acquitted,
he was compelled to pay the cost of his prosecution and was imprisoned a long time before trial.
Furthermore, the ordeal hastened McKinney's death.
Delaware, to be sure, contained numerous English and Welsh Presbyterians, but tiny Delaware
was already pretty thoroughly settled, and there was little good virgin land available.
New Jersey was also heavily Presbyterian, but these Presbyterians were either from England
or from Scotland proper, including Highlanders escaping after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.
There again, there was little need for indentured servants.