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Facts about the Ulster Scots - Part Three

Between 1717 and the American Revolutionary War years of the late 1770s and early 1780's an estimated quarter of a million Scots-Irish Presbyterian settlers left the Province of Ulster in the northern part of Ireland for the new lands across the Atlantic. They travelled in extremely hazardous conditions, in simple wooden sailing ships from the ports of Belfast, Lame, Londonderry, Newry and Portrush for the far-off berths of Philadelphia, New Castle (Delaware), Charleston, Baltimore and New York. Huddled together with the most meagre of belongings and money, they were a people forced to move because of the severe restrictions placed on their faith by the ruling British establishment of the day, and because of the economic deprivations prevailing in their Ulster homeland.

The first ships in the main thrust of emigration to the United States were chartered in 1717 and in that year, when drought completely ruined the crops on the Ulster farmlands, 5,000 men and women headed to Pennsylvania. There were five great waves of emigration to America from Ulster in the 18th century: 1717-18; 1725-29; 1740-41; 1754-55 and 1771-75.

Poverty had taken its toll on many families and the promise of a better life in a new world seemed irresistible. The Irish famine of 1740-41 led to the third great wave of immigration to America by the Scots-Irish. An estimated 400,000 people perished in that famine and when the Presbyterian settlers arrived in America on that trek they set their sights beyond the borders of Pennsylvania - along the path of the Great Valley of Virginia (the Shenandoah region) and to South and North Carolina.

The 1754-55 exodus resulted from appeals by colonists drought in America to settle on new lands of Virginia and the Carolina and from another calamitous drought in Ireland. In the last great wave of 1771-75, land leases in Ulster were cited as the main reason for the movement. Evictions were commonplace in Ulster at the time, and not enough ships could be found to carry the throng of Presbyterians who left the Province then.

Next to the English, the Scots-Irish became, by the end of the 18th century, the most influential of the white population in America, which, by 1790, numbered 3,173,444. At that time the Scots-Irish segment of the population totalled about 14 per cent and this figure was much higher in the Appalachian states of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina.