Histories

In the five decades preceding the American Revolution about a quarter million Irish people immigrated to the North American British colonies. The vast majority of them were Protestants, almost always Presbyterians, from Ulster (northern Ireland)—descendants of folks who had immigrated to Ireland from Scotland and northern England in the 17th century. Fleeing religious persecution and in search of better economic opportunities, they usually arrived in Pennsylvania, and from there took the Great Wagon Road south, into Virginia and the Carolinas. Typically poor and without the means to acquire property in the lowlands, they settled along the Appalachian and Piedmont frontiers, places that tended to suit their fiercely independent manner of living. Quick-tempered, resourceful, and Calvinist, they were called “Irish” by their neighbors, though they preferred to refer to themselves as Ulster folk. We know them today as the Scots-Irish.

The term “Scots-Irish” (or sometimes “Scotch-Irish”) came into use in the mid-19th century, as mass migration brought millions of Irish Catholics into the northeastern United States—an exodus that became a tidal wave during the Great Potato Famine (over the last 50 years of the 19th century, immigration and starvation emptied Ireland of almost half of its population). To distinguish the descendants of the Ulster Protestant immigrants from the Irish Catholic immigrants, the former came to called “Scots-Irish” and the latter simply “Irish” (or Irish-American).
Today nearly 10% of the U.S. population (over 31 million people) self-identify their ancestry as “Irish.” About 3 million self-identify as “Scots-Irish.”