While there had been Scottish immigration to America in the 1600s, it was not until 1700 that it began in numbers. Between 1707, when Scotland and England combined to form the British Union, giving the Scots legal access to all of the colonies, and 1775, when the American Revolution began, Scottish immigration soared. Immigration paused during the Revolution, but resumed after the fighting ended. Scots immigrated to American in three distinct groups:
Lowland Scots: Assimilated to English
ways, the Lowland Scots were primarily skilled tradesmen, farmers, and
professionals pulled by greater economic opportunity in America. They
usually immigrated as individuals or single families, then dispersed in the
colonies and completed their assimilation to Anglo-American
ways.
Highland Scots: More desperate than
Lowland Scots,
the Highlanders responded primarily to the push of their
deteriorating circumstances. In 1746 the British army
brutally
suppressed the Jacobite Rebellion in the
Highlands and Parliament outlawed
many of the
Highlanders' traditions and institutions, creating
much
discontent. At mid-century, the common
Highlanders also
suffered from a pervasive rural
poverty worsened by the rising rents
demanded by
their landlords. The immigrants primarily came from
the
relatively prosperous peasants, those who possessed
the means to emigrate and
feared a fall into the growing
ranks of the impoverished.
After 1750,
emigration brokers and ambitious colonial
land speculators frequented the
northwest coast of
Scotland to procure Highland emigrants. The
brokers
and speculators recognized that the tough Highlanders
were
especially well prepared for the rigors of a
transatlantic passage and
colonial settlement. Preferring
cheap, if
dangerous lands, the Highland Scots clustered
in frontier valleys,
especially along the Cape Fear River
in North Carolina, the Mohawk
River in New York, and
the Altamaha River in Georgia. By
clustering they
preserved their distinctive Gaelic language
and Highland
customs, in contrast with the assimilating Lowland
immigrants.
Scotch-Irish (or Ulster Scots): Nearly half of all Scots immigrants came from Ulster, in Northern Ireland, where their parents and grandparents had colonized during the 1690s. Like the Highlanders, the Scotch-Irish fled from deteriorating conditions. During the 1710s and 1720s they suffered from ethnic violence with the Catholic Irish, a depressed market for their linen, the hunger of several poor harvests, and the increased rents charged by grasping landlords. The Ulster immigration to the colonies began in 1718 and accelerated during the 1720s.
The Scotch-Irish or Ulster Scots immigrated in groups, generally
organized by their Presbyterian ministers, who negotiated with shippers to
arrange passage. Once in the colonies, the Scotch-Irish gravitated to the
frontier where land was cheaper, enabling large groups to settle together.
Their clannishness helped the immigrants cope with their new setting, but it
also generated frictions with the English colonists. Feeling superior to
the Catholic Irish, the Ulster Scots bitterly resented that so many colonists
lumped all the Irish together. In 1720 some Ulster Scots in New Hampshire
bristled that they were "termed Irish people, when we so frequently ventured our
all, for the British
crown and liberties against the Irish Papists
[Catholics]." As a compromise they became known in America as the
Scotch-Irish.