They were hard men and women, accustomed to privation, travail their normal lot, mercy to an enemy never uppermost in their thoughts.

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 87.

In the early seventeenth century, in a continuation of an effort England had begun five centuries before to subdue Ireland, James I of England, who was also James VI of Scotland, confiscated the Ulster lands of the Irish aristocracy and created the Plantation of Ulster. On it were settled Scottish Lowlanders and English farmers and Londoners, Protestants all. Earlier settlements under private initiative were also composed of Scottish and English Protestants. James also hoped that flooding the land with Lowland Scots and English would prevent joint actions by Irish Celts and Scottish Highland Celts. Thus were the seeds planted for the terrible “troubles” we have witnessed on our television sets for the past decades.

Many of the Lowland Scots who went to Ulster in large numbers to escape poverty had exchanged one border for another. In Scotland they had fought with their fellow borderers the English in a barbarous manner for 400 years. Raid and counter-raid and butchery had succeeded each other in dreary procession. Yet, ironically, if the Lowlanders bore a cultural resemblance to any people, it was to their enemies the English of the border counties, and in America they would mix easily with them, fight shoulder to shoulder, even follow and lead them into battle. In the borderlands of Ulster incessant and savage war was waged with the “wild Irish,” as the Celtic Irish were then commonly called. The Lowlanders who became Ulster Scots mingled and intermarried with the English and with French Huguenots, but so rarely with the Celtic Irish Catholics that the two distinctive communities remained bitter enemies. At the same time the settlers prospered as farmers, weavers, and in the woolen and linen trades. Their prosperity, however, caused English protests, and late-seventeenth-century laws restricting their trade brought them economic distress. Anti-Presbyterian laws, taxation to support the Church of England, rapacious and absentee English landlords, and throughout the eighteenth century a series of severe economic depressions led to massive discontent. Poverty, often desperate, once more became their lot. Beginning about 1715 and ending in 1775 when the Revolution temporarily blocked immigration, about a quarter of a million Scotch Irish fled Ulster for America. The Celtic Irish Catholics were not part of this movement. There were few of them in colonial America.

They were “strangers to our laws and customs,” complained the Philadelphia Quaker James Dickinson of the Scotch Irish, and this has a ring of familiarity to twentieth-century ears. But the strangers’ descendants became lawmakers themselves in their new land, and for good and ill their customs and characteristics would become deeply woven into the American fabric. Once here, they never looked back. They had arrived in the promised land. They never cared to see Ulster again. Among them were a sprinkling of yeoman farmers and a thin upper stratum of provincial gentry known as the Ascendancy. The latter included such families as Polk, Calhoun, and Jackson: to the young Republic they would supply national leaders.

As a group, however, the Scotch Irish were overwhelmingly poor. Some early arrivals went to Massachusetts, but they and the Puritans were incompatible, and they pushed on to western Massachusetts and north to Maine and New Hampshire. Although there were more Scotch Irish in the colonies north of Pennsylvania than generally supposed, they made their greatest colonial impact in central and western Pennsylvania and the southern Back Country. They poured in largely through the ports of Philadelphia and New Castle, Delaware, and from there struck out for the Back Country. From Lancaster County west, Pennsylvania became their American homeland, and they treated it as they did every place they went, as theirs to take and keep. They introduced to America the tradition of squatting on unused property and daring anyone to put them off. They handled Indians roughly and were little less gentle with white authorities. Once when officials including a sheriff and surveyor tried to intimidate some Scotch Irish, “A body of some seventy joined circlewise around Mr. Parsons’ instrument, and began narrowing in upon it, the front ones on foot, the rear ones on horseback.” The official party left. Their attitude toward land as reported by the Provincial Secretary of Pennsylvania was simple: they “alleged that it was against the laws of God and nature, that so much land should be idle, while so many Christians wanted it to labor on, and to raise their bread.”

Their numbers increased dramatically by immigration and a lively fertility. From Pennsylvania the Scotch Irish spread southward by means of the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, across the Potomac and through Maryland to the Great Valley of Virginia, the beautiful Shenandoah. German settlers dominated the Valley’s northern reaches, but many Scotch Irish stopped in the central and southern parts, some for good, others until the urge to seek something better prodded them onward. The irrepressible Charles Lee lived in the Shenandoah before the war, and is reported to have said that Virginia was neither a democracy nor an aristocracy but a macocracy. Those who went into the far southwestern mountains of Virginia we will meet again during one of the most dramatic episodes of the war. Nor are we finished with the people who chose to continue south to Wachovia in North Carolina, from whence they followed the Catawba Trading Path to Waxhaw Creek, where the first handful of white “settlers arrived in May 1751. They and their progeny and kindred folk spread out over the fertile, well-watered, rolling uplands in that large swath of land between Charlotte and Camden called the Waxhaws and claimed it as their own.
These were the people who buried Buford’s dead soldiers where they died, nursed the wounded at the Waxhaws Presbyterian Church, and plotted dark deeds of revenge.

These were the people who in the blackest time for the cause would bend but never break. They were hard men and women, accustomed to privation, travail their normal lot, mercy to an enemy never uppermost in their thoughts.