http://www.battlehill395.freeserve.co.uk/facts%20about%20the%20ulster%20scots%20part%20five.htm

Facts about the Ulster Scots - Part Five

The two men who founded the great city of Nashville - John Donelson and James Robertson - were also of County Antrim stock; those sturdy founding fathers of Knoxville - James White, John Adair and George McNutt. There were illustrious churchmen like Revs Samuel Doak, Joseph Rhea, John Craig, William Marlin, William Tennent and Samuel Black, and the first map maker of Tennessee in the early 19th century, Matthew Rhea.

And there was Arthur Dobbs, who was instrumental in populating large Ulster-Scots settlements in North Carolina in the 1740s-1750s.

Many Civil War soldiers of distinction were of Ulster-Scots origin: Thomas John Jonathan 'Stonewall' Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, Ulysses Grant, George Brinton McClellan and Philip Sheridan. In the Carolinas, North and South, it is estimated that 40 per cent of Confederate soldiers were of Scots-Irish lineage. North Carolina suffered the highest casualties of the War - Company 'B' of Jackson's Guards from the Waxhaws, a Scots-Irish stronghold, had the biggest loss of any Confederate unit, 80 killed or wounded at Gettysburg.

Others of Scots-Irish roots were Samuel Lanthom Clemens (author Mark Twain), Cyrus McCormick, the man who revolutionised farming; songwriter Stephen Foster, and James Stewart, the Holywood movie star. The wealthy Hearst publishing family can trace their history back to John Hearst, a County Monaghan Presbyterian who sailed from Newry in County Down in 1764 for a fare of four shillings and eight pence.

The Scots-Irish who headed west 200-250 years ago belonged to the same breed of people who today constitute the majority Protestant and Unionist community in Northern Ireland. Virtually all of these emigrants led the vanguard against the British in the War of Independence in the 1770/1780s.

In Northern Ireland today, the Scots-Irish (the Protestant-Unionist population) pledge themselves to the maintenance of the link with Britain. The complexities of the Several hundred years of British history since fully explain this paradoxical situation in terms of economic benefit and cultural attachments for the one million people who presently hold this view.

In the United States today an estimated 44 million people claim Irish extraction. But while the Irish American community, the descendants of the Roman Catholic emigrants who moved at the time of the potato famine in the mid-19th century are the most vocal and politically active on Ireland. 56 per cent of Americans with Irish roots are of Protestant stock, whose forebears were the Scots-Irish Presbyterians who settled on the frontier in the 18th century.