Some historians describe these immigrants as “Ulster Irish” or “Northern Irish.” It is true that many sailed from the province of Ulster in northern Ireland, but these labels are not accurate when applied to the movement as a whole. The emigration from Ulster was part of much larger flow which drew from the lowlands of Scotland, the north of England, and every side of the Irish Sea.
Many scholars call these people “Scotch-Irish.” That expression is an Americanism, rarely used in Britain and much resented by the people to whom it was attached. “We’re no Eerish bot Scoatch,” one of them was heard to say in Pennsylvania.15 Some preferred to be called Anglo-Irish, a label that was more commonly applied to them than Scotch-Irish during the eighteenth century. Others were called “Saxon-Scotch.”16 One scholar writes: “ … some Ulster Protestants derived from families that were not Scottish at all, but English or Irish,” He adds, “ … some immigrant groups that historians have labeled as Scots-Irish never lived in Ireland but came directly from Scotland.”17
A student of Appalachian culture in the early twentieth century reached the same conclusion:
Inquiries … as to family history and racial stock rarely bring a more definite answer than that grandparents or great-grandparents came from North Carolina or Virginia or occasionally from Pennsylvania, and that they “reckon” their folks were “English,” “Scotch,” or “Irish,” any of which designations may mean Scotch-Irish.18
Two historians have characterized these people as “Celts.” But this label is also very much mistaken as a rounded description of their ethnic origins. Some among them were indeed of Celtic descent. Before the Roman invasion of the north, the dominant people in the north of England were a loose confederacy of Celtic warrior tribes called in Latin Brigantes. The ruined ramparts of their hill forts may still be seen at Carrock Fell in Cumbria and many other places throughout the region.19 The Brigantes were broken by the Romans about the year A.D. 80. Thereafter, many other people invaded and colonized the region—the Romans themselves in the first century, the Saxons in the sixth century, the Vikings and Irish in the tenth century, and the Norman French in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. All of these groups contributed to the growth of this regional culture.20
By the eighteenth century, the culture of this region bore little resemblence to the customs of the ancient Celts. The dominant language was English—unlike that of Gaelic-speaking Irish Catholic peasants, Scottish highlanders, Welsh cottagers, and Cornish miners. The borderers had comparatively little contact (much of it hostile) with these Celtic people. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was observed that “the Ulster settlers mingled freely with the English Puritans and Huguenots,” but married very rarely with the Gaelic-speaking people of Ireland and Scotland.21
Few Gaelic-speaking people emigrated from Ireland, Cornwall or Wales to the American colonies before the nineteenth century. Celtic Irish immigrants were excluded by law from some American colonies. A South Carolina statute of 1716 forbade “what is commonly called native Irish, or persons of known scandalous character or Roman Catholics.”22
Gaelic-speaking Scottish highlanders also were ethnically distinct from the borderers. There was no love lost between lowland and highland Scots, who differed in language, politics, religion and culture. In America, Scottish highlanders tended to settle apart in North Carolina’s Cape Fear Valley, where Gaelic continued to be spoken even into the late twentieth century. Many of these transplanted highlanders became Tories in the American Revolution, largely because their border neighbors were Whig. The fighting between them was as savage as any conflict in North Britain.23
“We are a mixed people,” a border immigrant declared in America during the eighteenth century. “We are a mix’d medley,” said another. So they were in many ways. They were mixed in their social rank, mixed in their religious denominations, and most profoundly mixed in their ancestry, which was Celtic, Roman, German, English, Scandinavian, Irish and Scottish in varying proportions. They were also very mixed in their place of residence—coming as they did from England, Scotland and Ireland.24
But in another way, these immigrants were very similar to one another. No matter whether rich or poor, Anglican or Presbyterian, Saxon or Celt, they were all a border people. They shared a unique regional culture which was the product of a place in time.