Quotes About Scotch-Irish

Abbot E. Smith, an authority on the subject, estimates that 'not less than a half, nor more than two-thirds, of all white immigrants to the colonies were indentured servants or redemptioners or convicts,' and that, beginning in 1728, 'by far the greatest number of servants and redemptioners' came from Ireland. It would seem, therefore, that more than one hundred thousand Scotch-Irish came to America as indentured servants.

They were "Scotch-Irish"—that is, from the lowlands of Scotland, the northern counties of England, and Ulster in Northern Ireland. The borderlands—as this region was known—were remote and lawless territories that had been fought over for hundreds of years. The people of the region were steeped in violence.

Interestingly, some of the worst anti-Irish discrimination came from the Scotch-Irish, who wanted to make clear that they were a different group from the impoverished newcomers.

It was these elite families which produced such notable Americans of Scotch-Irish ancestry as Patrick Henry. Andrew Jackson, John Calhoun, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Sam Houston. and others.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century a large number of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians came out, who, with Germans from the middle colonies, pushed out to the frontier, and did much to open up the western country.

The leading planter families of the Delta consider themselves to be members of the Southern upper class—which is to say that they are Episcopalian, of British or Scotch-Irish extraction, and had ancestors living in the upper South before 1800—