Scotch-Irish Americans

Scotch-Irish Americans are American descendants of primarily Ulster Scots people, who emigrated from Ulster (Ireland's northernmost province) to the United States between the 18th and 19th centuries, with their ancestors having originally migrated to Ulster, mainly from the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England in the 17th century.
In the 2017 American Community Survey, 5.39 million (1.7% of the population) reported Scottish ancestry, an additional 3 million (0.9% of the population) identified more specifically with Scotch-Irish ancestry, and many people who claim "American ancestry" may actually be of Scotch-Irish ancestry.
The term Scotch-Irish is used primarily in the United States, with people in Great Britain or Ireland who are of a similar ancestry identifying as Ulster Scots people. Many left for North America, but over 100,000 Scottish Presbyterians still lived in Ulster in 1700. Many English-born settlers of this period were also Presbyterians. When King Charles I attempted to force these Presbyterians into the Church of England in the 1630s, many chose to emigrate to North America, where religious liberty was greater. Later attempts to force the Church of England's control over dissident Protestants in Ireland led to further waves of immigration to the transatlantic colonies.
The term is first known to have been used for Scottish Catholics in Ireland. In a letter of April 14, 1573, in reference to descendants of "gallowglass" mercenaries from Scotland who had settled in Ireland, Elizabeth I of England wrote:
This term continued in usage for over a century before the earliest known American reference appeared in a Maryland affidavit in 1689–90.
Scotch-Irish, according to James Leyburn, "is an Americanism, generally unknown in Scotland and Ireland, and rarely used by British historians". It became common in the United States after 1850. The term is somewhat ambiguous because some of the Scotch-Irish have little or no Scottish or Irish ancestry at all: numerous dissenter families had also been transplanted to Ulster from northern England, in particular the border counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire. Smaller numbers of migrants also came from Wales, the Isle of Man, and the southeast of England, and others were Protestant religious refugees from Flanders, the German Palatinate, and France (such as the French Huguenot ancestors of Davy Crockett). What united these different national groups was a base of Calvinist religious beliefs, and their separation from the established church (the Church of England and Church of Ireland in this case). That said, the large ethnic Scottish element in the Plantation of Ulster gave the settlements a Scottish character.
Upon arrival in North America, these migrants at first usually identified simply as Irish, without the qualifier Scotch. It was not until a century later, following the surge in Irish immigration after the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, that the descendants of the earlier arrivals began to commonly call themselves "Scotch-Irish" to distinguish themselves from the newer, poor, predominantly Catholic immigrants. At first, the two groups had little interaction in America, as the Scots-Irish had become settled many decades earlier, primarily in the backcountry of the Appalachian region. The new wave of Catholic Irish settled primarily in port cities such as Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, Memphis and New Orleans, where large immigrant communities formed and there were an increasing number of jobs. Many of the new Irish migrants also went to the interior in the 19th century, attracted to jobs on large-scale infrastructure projects such as canals and railroads.
The usage Scots-Irish developed in the late 19th century as a relatively recent version of the term. Two early citations include: 1) "a grave, elderly man of the race known in America as 'Scots-Irish'" (1870); and 2) "Dr. Cochran was of stately presence, of fair and florid complexion, features which testified his Scots-Irish descent" (1884).
Scotch was the usual adjective for things pertaining to Scotland, including people, until the 19th century, when it was eclipsed by Scottish. It survives in certain set phrases, such as Scotch whisky and Scotch broth, and in the term Scotch-Irish. Although described by Merriam-Webster dictionaries as having first appeared in 1744, the term is undoubtedly older. An affidavit of William Patent, dated March 15, 1689, in a case against a Mr. Matthew Scarbrough in Somerset County, Maryland, quotes Mr. Patent as saying he was told by Scarbrough that "it was no more sin to kill me then to kill a dogg, or any Scotch Irish dogg".
Leyburn cites the following as early American uses of the term before 1744.
The Oxford English Dictionary says the first use of the term Scotch-Irish came in Pennsylvania in 1744:
In Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, historian David Hackett Fischer asserts:
Fischer prefers to speak of "borderers" (referring to the historically war-torn England-Scotland border) as the population ancestral to the "backcountry" "cultural stream" (one of the four major and persistent cultural streams from Ireland and Britain which he identifies in American history). He notes the borderers had substantial English and Scandinavian roots. He describes them as being quite different from Gaelic-speaking groups such as the Scottish Highlanders or Irish (that is, Gaelic-speaking and predominantly Roman Catholic).
Many have claimed that such a distinction should not be used, and that those called Scotch-Irish are simply Irish, despite having previously come from Scotland or England. Other Irish limit the term Irish to those of native Gaelic stock, and prefer to describe the Ulster Protestants as British (a description many Ulster Protestants have preferred themselves to Irish, at least since the Irish Free State broke free from the United Kingdom, although Ulstermen has been adopted in order to maintain a distinction from the native Irish Gaels while retaining a claim to the North of Ireland). However, as one scholar observed in 1944, "in this country [the US], where they have been called Scotch-Irish for over two hundred years, it would be absurd to give them a name by which they are not known here. ... Here their name is Scotch-Irish; let us call them by it."
From 1710 to 1775, over 200,000 people settled from Ulster to the original thirteen American colonies. The largest numbers went to Pennsylvania. From that base some went south into Virginia, the Carolinas and across the South, with a large concentration in the Appalachian region. Others headed west to western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and the Midwest.
Transatlantic flows were halted by the American Revolution, but resumed after 1783, with total of 100,000 arriving in America between 1783 and 1812. By that point few were young servants and more were mature craftsmen, and they settled in industrial centers, including Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New York, where many became skilled workers, foremen and entrepreneurs as the Industrial Revolution took off in the U.S. Another half million came to America 1815 to 1845; another 900,000 came in 1851–99. While settling in the new world evolved Scotch-Irish culture, what the settlers brought is the basis of what has been and is referred to as American culture.
According to the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, there were 400,000 U.S. residents of Irish birth or ancestry in 1790 and half of this group was descended from Ulster, and half from the other three provinces of Ireland.
A separate migration brought many to Canada, where they are most numerous in rural Ontario and Nova Scotia.
Because of the proximity of the islands of Britain and Ireland, migrations in both directions had been occurring since Ireland was first settled after the retreat of the ice sheets. Gaels from Ireland colonized current southwestern Scotland as part of the Kingdom of Dál Riata, eventually mixing with the native Pictish culture throughout Scotland. The Irish Gaels had previously been named Scoti by the Romans, and eventually their name was applied to the entire Kingdom of Scotland.
The origins of the Scotch-Irish lie primarily in the Scottish Lowlands and northern England, particularly in the Border Country on either side of the Anglo-Scottish border, a region that had seen centuries of conflict. In the near constant state of war between England and Scotland during the Middle Ages, the livelihood of the people on the borders was devastated by the contending armies. Even when the countries were not at war, tension remained high, and royal authority in one or the other kingdom was often weak. The uncertainty of existence led the people of the borders to seek security through a system of family ties, similar to the clan system in the Scottish Highlands. Known as the Border Reivers, these families relied on their own strength and cunning to survive, and a culture of cattle raiding and thievery developed.
Though remaining politically distinct, Scotland, England (considered at the time to include Wales, annexed in 1535), and Ireland came to be ruled by a single monarch with the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when James VI, King of Scots, succeeded Elizabeth I as ruler of England and Ireland. In addition to the unstable border region, James also inherited Elizabeth's conflicts in Ireland. Following the end of the Irish Nine Years' War in 1603, and the Flight of the Earls in 1607, James embarked in 1609 on a systematic plantation of English and Scottish Protestant settlers to Ireland's northern province of Ulster. The Plantation of Ulster was seen as a way to relocate the Border Reiver families to Ireland to bring peace to the Anglo-Scottish border country, and also to provide fighting men who could suppress the native Irish in Ireland.
The first major influx of Scots and English into Ulster had come in 1606 during the settlement of east Down onto land cleared of native Irish by private landlords chartered by James. This process was accelerated with James's official plantation in 1609, and further augmented during the subsequent Irish Confederate Wars. The first of the Stuart Kingdoms to collapse into civil war was Ireland where, prompted in part by the anti-Catholic rhetoric of the Covenanters in Scotland, Irish Catholics launched a rebellion in October, 1641.
In reaction to the proposal by Charles I and Thomas Wentworth to raise an army manned by Irish Catholics to put down the Covenanter movement in Scotland, the Parliament of Scotland had threatened to invade Ireland in order to achieve "the extirpation of Popery out of Ireland" (according to the interpretation of Richard Bellings, a leading Irish politician of the time). The fear this caused in Ireland unleashed a wave of massacres against Protestant English and Scottish settlers, mostly in Ulster, once the rebellion had broken out. All sides displayed extreme cruelty in this phase of the war. Around 4000 settlers were massacred and a further 12,000 may have died of privation after being driven from their homes. This, along with Irish Catholic refugees fleeing, caused Ireland's population to drop by 25%.
William Petty's figure of 37,000 Protestants massacred is far too high, perhaps by a factor of ten; certainly more recent research suggests that a much more realistic figure is roughly 4,000 deaths. In one notorious incident, the Protestant inhabitants of Portadown were taken captive and then massacred on the bridge in the town. The settlers responded in kind, as did the Dublin Castle administration, with attacks on the Irish civilian population. Massacres of native civilians occurred at Rathlin Island and elsewhere.
In early 1642, the Covenanters sent an army to Ulster to defend the Scottish settlers there from the Irish rebels who had attacked them after the outbreak of the rebellion. The original intention of the Scottish army was to re-conquer Ireland, but due to logistical and supply problems, it was never in a position to advance far beyond its base in eastern Ulster. The Covenanter force remained in Ireland until the end of the civil wars but was confined to its garrison around Carrickfergus after its defeat by the native Ulster Army at the Battle of Benburb in 1646. After the war was over, many of the soldiers settled permanently in Ulster. Another major influx of Scots into Ulster occurred in the 1690s, when tens of thousands of people fled a famine in Scotland to come to Ireland.
A few generations after arriving in Ireland, considerable numbers of Ulster-Scots emigrated to the North American colonies of Great Britain throughout the 18th century (between 1717 and 1770 alone, about 250,000 settled in what would become the United States). According to Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1988), Protestants were one-third the population of Ireland, but three-quarters of all emigrants leaving from 1700 to 1776; 70% of these Protestants were Presbyterians. Other factors contributing to the mass exodus of Ulster Scots to America during the 18th century were a series of droughts and rising rents imposed by their landlords.
During the course of the 17th century, the number of settlers belonging to Calvinist dissenting sects, including Scottish Presbyterians, English Baptists and Quakers, French and Flemish Huguenots, and German Palatines, became the majority among the Protestant settlers in the province of Ulster. However, the Presbyterians and other dissenters, along with Catholics, were not members of the established church and were consequently legally disadvantaged by the Penal Laws, which gave full rights only to members of the Church of England or Church of Ireland.
Members of the Church of Ireland mostly consisted of the Protestant Ascendancy, Protestant settlers of English descent who formed the elite of 17th and 18th century Ireland. For this reason, up until the 19th century, and despite their common fear of Irish Catholics, there was considerable disharmony between the Presbyterians and the Protestant Ascendancy in Ulster. As a result of this, many Ulster-Scots, along with Catholic native Irish, ignored religious differences to join the United Irishmen and participate in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, in support of Age of Enlightenment-inspired egalitarian and republican goals influenced by the French Revolution.
Scholarly estimate is that over 200,000 Scotch-Irish migrated to the Americas between 1717 and 1775. As a late-arriving group, they found that land in the coastal areas of the British colonies was either already owned or too expensive, so they quickly left for the more mountainous interior where land could be obtained less expensively. Here they lived on the first frontier of America. Early frontier life was challenging, but poverty and hardship were familiar to them. The term hillbilly has often been applied to their descendants in the mountains, carrying connotations of poverty, backwardness and violence.
The first trickle of Scotch-Irish settlers arrived in New England. Valued for their fighting prowess as well as for their Protestant dogma, they were invited by Cotton Mather and other leaders to come over to help settle and secure the frontier. In this capacity, many of the first permanent settlements in Maine and New Hampshire, especially after 1718, were Scotch-Irish and many place names as well as the character of Northern New Englanders reflect this fact. The Scotch-Irish brought the potato with them from Ireland (although the potato originated in South America, it was not known in North America until brought over from Europe). In Maine it became a staple crop as well as an economic base.
From 1717 for the next thirty or so years, the primary points of entry for the Ulster immigrants were Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New Castle, Delaware. The Scotch-Irish radiated westward across the Alleghenies, as well as into Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The typical migration involved small networks of related families who settled together, worshipped together, and intermarried, avoiding outsiders.
Most Scotch-Irish landed in Philadelphia. Without much cash, they moved to free lands on the frontier, becoming the typical western "squatters", the frontier guard of the colony, and what the historian Frederick Jackson Turner described as "the cutting-edge of the frontier".
The Scotch-Irish moved up the Delaware River to Bucks County, and then up the Susquehanna and Cumberland valleys, finding flat lands along the rivers and creeks to set up their log cabins, their grist mills, and their Presbyterian churches. Chester, Lancaster, and Dauphin counties became their strongholds, and they built towns such as Chambersburg, Gettysburg, Carlisle, and York; the next generation moved into western Pennsylvania.
With large numbers of children who needed their own inexpensive farms, the Scotch-Irish avoided areas already settled by Germans and Quakers and moved south, through the Shenandoah Valley, and through the Blue Ridge Mountains into Virginia. These migrants followed the Great Wagon Road from Lancaster, through Gettysburg, and down through Staunton, Virginia, to Big Lick (now Roanoke), Virginia. Here the pathway split, with the Wilderness Road taking settlers west into Tennessee and Kentucky, while the main road continued south into the Carolinas.
Because the Scotch-Irish settled the frontier of Pennsylvania and western Virginia, they were greatly affected by the French and Indian War and Pontiac's War. The Scotch-Irish were frequently in conflict with indigenous tribes and did most of the fighting on the frontier from New Hampshire to the Carolinas. The Scots-Irish also became the middlemen who handled trade and negotiations between indigenous tribes and the colonial governments.
Especially in Pennsylvania, whose pacifist Quaker leaders had made no provision for a militia, Scotch-Irish settlements were frequently destroyed and the settlers killed, captured or forced to flee after attacks by the Lenape (Delaware), Shawnee, Seneca, and others tribes of western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Country. Indigenous attacks occurred within 60 miles of Philadelphia, and in July 1763 the Pennsylvania Assembly authorized the raising of a 700-strong militia to be used only for defense. Formed into two units of rangers, the Cumberland Boys and the Paxton Boys, the militia soon exceeded their mandate and began offensive forays against Lenape villages.
The Paxton Boys' leaders received information, which they believed credible, that "hostile" tribes were receiving information and support from the "friendly" tribe of Susquehannock (Conestoga) settled in Lancaster County, who were under the protection of the Pennsylvania government. On December 14, 1763, about fifty Paxton Boys rode to Conestoga Town, near Millersville, Pennsylvania, and murdered six Conestogas. Pennsylvanian authorities placed the remaining fourteen Conestogas in protective custody in the Lancaster workhouse, but the Paxton Boys broke in, killing and mutilating all fourteen on December 27, 1763.
In February 1764, the Paxton Boys with a few hundred backcountry settlers, primarily Scotch-Irish, marched on Philadelphia with the intent of killing the Moravian Indians who had been given shelter there. Benjamin Franklin led a delegation that met the marchers at Germantown, Philadelphia. Following negotiations the Paxton Boys agreed to disperse and submit their grievances in writing.
The United States Declaration of Independence contained 56 delegate signatures. Of the signers, eight were of Irish descent. Two signers, George Taylor and James Smith, were born in Ulster. The remaining five Irish-Americans, George Read, Thomas McKean, Thomas Lynch, Jr., Edward Rutledge and Charles Carroll, were the sons or grandsons of Irish immigrants, and at least McKean had Ulster heritage.
In contrast to the Scottish Highlanders, the Scotch-Irish were generally ardent supporters of American independence from Britain in the 1770s. In Pennsylvania, Virginia, and most of the Carolinas, support for the revolution was "practically unanimous". One Hessian officer said, "Call this war by whatever name you may, only call it not an American rebellion; it is nothing more or less than a Scotch Irish Presbyterian rebellion." A British major general testified to the House of Commons that "half the rebel Continental Army were from Ireland". Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, with its large Scotch-Irish population, was to make the first declaration for independence from Britain in the Mecklenburg Declaration of 1775.
The Scots-Irish "Overmountain Men" of Virginia and North Carolina formed a militia which won the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780, resulting in the British abandonment of a southern campaign, and for some historians "marked the turning point of the American Revolution".
One exception to the high level of patriotism was the Waxhaw settlement on the lower Catawba River along the North Carolina-South Carolina boundary, where Loyalism was strong. The area experienced two main settlement periods of Scotch-Irish. During the 1750s–1760s, second- and third-generation Scotch-Irish Americans moved from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. This particular group had large families, and as a group they produced goods for themselves and for others. They generally were Patriots.
Just prior to the American Revolution, a second stream of immigrants came directly from Ireland via Charleston. This group was forced to move into an underdeveloped area because they could not afford expensive land. Most of this group remained loyal to the Crown or neutral when the war began. Prior to Charles Cornwallis's march into the backcountry in 1780, two-thirds of the men among the Waxhaw settlement had declined to fight for the Patriots. However, local Loyalists eventually shifted their allegience to the Patriot cause, as it "was better to fight the British than go to war against their neighbors-a prospect more fearful by far than resisting an increasingly unfriendly, but decidedly temporary, occupying army-or so the men who flooded into the American camp in the summer of 1780 must have reasoned, driven as they were, not by strongly pro-American or anti-British sentiment, but by the power of these local relationships-by loyalty to, and fear of, their neighbors."
In the 1790s, the new American government assumed the debts the individual states had amassed during the American Revolutionary War, and the Congress placed a tax on whiskey (among other things) to help repay those debts. Large producers were assessed a tax of six cents a gallon. Smaller producers, many of whom were Scottish (often Scotch-Irish) descent and located in the more remote areas, were taxed at a higher rate of nine cents a gallon. These rural settlers were short of cash to begin with, and lacked any practical means to get their grain to market, other than fermenting and distilling it into relatively potable spirits.
From Pennsylvania to Georgia, the western counties engaged in a campaign of harassment of the federal tax collectors. "Whiskey Boys" also conducted violent protests in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, and Georgia. This civil disobedience eventually culminated in armed conflict in the Whiskey Rebellion. President George Washington accompanied 13,000 soldiers from Carlisle to Bedford, Pennsylvania, where plans were completed to suppress the western Pennsylvania insurrection, and he returned to Philadelphia in his carriage.
Author and U.S. Senator Jim Webb puts forth a thesis in his book Born Fighting (2004) to suggest that the character traits he ascribes to the Scotch-Irish such as loyalty to kin, extreme mistrust of governmental authority and legal strictures, and a propensity to bear arms and to use them, helped shape the American identity. In the same year that Webb's book was released, Barry A. Vann published his second book, entitled Rediscovering the South's Celtic Heritage. As in his earlier book, From Whence They Came (1998), Vann argues that these traits have left their imprint on the Upland South. In 2008, Vann followed up his earlier work with a book entitled In Search of Ulster Scots Land: The Birth and Geotheological Imagings of a Transatlantic People, which professes how these traits may manifest themselves in conservative voting patterns and religious affiliation that characterizes the Bible Belt.
The iron and steel industry developed rapidly after 1830 and became one of the dominant factors in industrial America by the 1860s. Ingham (1978) examined the leadership of the industry in its most important center, Pittsburgh, as well as smaller cities. He concludes that the leadership of the iron and steel industry nationwide was "largely Scotch-Irish". Ingham finds that the Scotch-Irish held together cohesively throughout the 19th century and "developed their own sense of uniqueness".
New immigrants after 1800 made Pittsburgh a major Scotch-Irish stronghold. For example, Thomas Mellon (b. Ulster; 1813–1908) left Ireland in 1823 and became the founder of the notable Mellon family, which played a central role in banking and industries such as aluminum and oil. As Barnhisel (2005) finds, industrialists such as James H. Laughlin (b. Ulster; 1806–1882) of Jones and Laughlin Steel Company constituted the "Scots-Irish Presbyterian ruling stratum of Pittsburgh society".
Archeologists and folklorists have examined the folk culture of the Scotch-Irish in terms of material goods, such as housing, as well as speech patterns and folk songs. Much of the research has been done in Appalachia.
The border origin of the Scotch-Irish is supported by study of the traditional music and folklore of the Appalachian Mountains, settled primarily by the Scotch-Irish in the 18th century. Musicologist Cecil Sharp collected hundreds of folk songs in the region, and observed that the musical tradition of the people "seems to point to the North of England, or to the Lowlands, rather than the Highlands, of Scotland, as the country from which they originally migrated. For the Appalachian tunes...have far more affinity with the normal English folk-tune than with that of the Gaelic-speaking Highlander."
Similarly, elements of mountain folklore trace back to events in the Lowlands of Scotland. As an example, it was recorded in the early 20th century that Appalachian children were frequently warned, "You must be good or Clavers will get you." To the mountain residents, "Clavers" was simply a bogeyman used to keep children in line, yet unknown to them the phrase derives from the 17th century Scotsman John Graham of Claverhouse, called "Bloody Clavers" by the Presbyterian Scottish Lowlanders whose religion he tried to suppress.
In terms of the stone houses they built, the "hall-parlor" floor plan (two rooms per floor with chimneys on both ends) was common among the gentry in Ulster. Scotch-Irish immigrants brought it over in the 18th century and it became a common floor plan in Tennessee, Kentucky, and elsewhere. Stone houses were difficult to build, and most pioneers relied on simpler log cabins.
Scotch-Irish quilters in West Virginia developed a unique interpretation of pieced-block quilt construction. Their quilts embody an aesthetic reflecting Scotch-Irish social history—the perennial condition of living on the periphery of mainstream society both geographically and philosophically. Cultural values espousing individual autonomy and self-reliance within a strong kinship structure are related to Scotch-Irish quilting techniques. Prominent features of these quilts include: 1) blocks pieced in a repeating pattern but varied by changing figure-ground relationships and, at times, obscured by the use of same-value colors and adjacent print fabrics, 2) lack of contrasting borders, and 3) a unified all-over quilting pattern, typically the "fans" design or rows of concentric arcs.
Montgomery (2006) analyzes the pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical distinctions of today's residents of the mountain South and traces patterns back to their Scotch-Irish ancestors. However, Crozier (1984) suggests that only a few lexical characteristics survived Scotch-Irish assimilation into American culture, although David Hackett Fischer in Albion's Seed (1989) estimated the influence of Ulster Scots on Upland South dialects of American English to be greater.
According to The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy, by Kory L. Meyerink and Loretto Dennis Szucs, the following were the countries of origin for new arrivals coming to the United States before 1790. The regions marked * were part of, or ruled by, the Kingdom of Great Britain (the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland after 1801). The ancestry of the 3,929,326 population in 1790 has been estimated by various sources by sampling last names in the 1790 census and assigning them a country of origin.
According to the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Thernstrom, S 1980, "Irish," p. 528), there were 400,000 Americans of Irish birth or ancestry in 1790; half of these were descended from Ulster, and half were descended from other provinces in Ireland.
The Census Bureau produced official estimates of the colonial American population with roots in the Irish province of Ulster, in collaboration with the American Council of Learned Societies, by scholarly classification of the names of all White heads of families recorded in the 1790 Census. The government required accurate estimates of the origins of the population as basis for computing National Origins Formula immigration quotas in the 1920s (i.e. how much of the annual immigrant quota would be allotted to the Irish Free State, as opposed to Northern Ireland which remained part of the United Kingdom). The final report estimated about 10% of the U.S. population in 1790 had ancestral roots in Ireland, about three fifths of that total from Ulster–broken down by state below:
Estimated Scotch-Irish American population in the Continental United States as of the 1790 Census
Finding the coast already heavily settled, most groups of settlers from the north of Ireland moved into the "western mountains", where they populated the Appalachian regions and the Ohio Valley. Others settled in northern New England, The Carolinas, Georgia and north-central Nova Scotia.
In the United States Census, 2000, 4.3 million Americans (1.5% of the U.S. population) claimed Scotch-Irish ancestry.
The author Jim Webb suggests that the true number of people with some Scotch-Irish heritage in the United States is in the region of 27 million.
The states with the most Scotch-Irish populations as of 2020:
The states with the top percentages of Scotch-Irish:
As of 2020, the distribution of self-identified Scotch-Irish Americans across the 50 states and DC is as presented in the following table:
The Scotch-Irish immigrants to North America in the 18th century were initially defined in part by their Presbyterianism. Many of the settlers in the Plantation of Ulster had been from dissenting and non-conformist religious groups which professed Calvinist thought. These included mainly Lowland Scot Presbyterians, but also English Puritans and Quakers, French Huguenots and German Palatines. These Calvinist groups mingled freely in church matters, and religious belief was more important than nationality, as these groups aligned themselves against both their Catholic Irish and Anglican English neighbors.
After their arrival in the New World, the predominantly Presbyterian Scotch-Irish began to move further into the mountainous back-country of Virginia and the Carolinas. The establishment of many settlements in the remote back-country put a strain on the ability of the Presbyterian Church to meet the new demand for qualified, college-educated clergy. Religious groups such as the Baptists and Methodists had no higher education requirement for their clergy to be ordained, and these groups readily provided ministers to meet the demand of the growing Scotch-Irish settlements. By about 1810, Baptist and Methodist churches were in the majority, and the descendants of the Scotch-Irish today remain predominantly Baptist or Methodist. Vann (2007) shows the Scotch-Irish played a major role in defining the Bible Belt in the Upper South in the 18th century. He emphasizes the high educational standards they sought, their "geotheological thought worlds" brought from the old country, and their political independence that was transferred to frontier religion.
In 1746, the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians created the College of New Jersey, later renamed Princeton University. The mission was training New Light Presbyterian ministers. The college became the educational as well as religious capital of Scotch-Irish America. By 1808, loss of confidence in the college within the Presbyterian Church led to the establishment of the separate Princeton Theological Seminary, but for many decades Presbyterian control over Princeton College continued. Meanwhile, Princeton Seminary, under the leadership of Charles Hodge, originated a conservative theology that in large part shaped Fundamentalist Protestantism in the 20th century.
While the larger Presbyterian Church was a mix of Scotch-Irish and Yankees from New England, several smaller Presbyterian groups were composed almost entirely of Scotch-Irish, and they display the process of assimilation into the broader American religious culture. Fisk (1968) traces the history of the Associate Reformed Church in the Old Northwest from its formation by a union of Associate and Reformed Presbyterians in 1782 to the merger of this body with the Seceder Scotch-Irish bodies to form the United Presbyterian Church in 1858. It became the Associate Reformed Synod of the West and remains centered in the Midwest. It withdrew from the parent body in 1820 because of the drift of the eastern churches toward assimilation into the larger Presbyterian Church with its Yankee traits. The Associate Reformed Synod of the West maintained the characteristics of an immigrant church with Scotch-Irish roots, emphasized the Westminster standards, used only the psalms in public worship, was Sabbatarian, and was strongly abolitionist and anti-Catholic. In the 1850s it exhibited many evidences of assimilation. It showed greater ecumenical interest, greater interest in evangelization of the West and of the cities, and a declining interest in maintaining the unique characteristics of its Scotch-Irish past.
Many presidents of the United States have ancestral links to Ulster. Three presidents had at least one parent born in Ulster: Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan and Chester A. Arthur. The Irish Protestant vote in the U.S. has not been studied as much as that of the Catholic Irish. In the 1820s and 1830s, Jackson supporters emphasized his Irish background, as did supporters of James Knox Polk, but since the 1840s it has been uncommon for a Protestant politician in America to be identified as Irish, but rather as "Scotch-Irish". In Canada, by contrast, Irish Protestants remained a cohesive political force well into the 20th century, identified with the then Conservative Party of Canada and especially with the Orange Institution, although this is less evident in today's politics.
More than one-third of all U.S. presidents had substantial ancestral origins in the Ulster. President Bill Clinton spoke proudly of that fact, and his own ancestral links with the province, during his two visits to Ulster.
Clinton is one of at least seventeen presidents descended from immigrants from Ulster. While many of the presidents have typically Ulster-Scots surnames – Jackson, Johnson, McKinley, Wilson – others, such as Roosevelt and Cleveland, have links which are less obvious.