The Celtic American South
Reimmigration to the mainland began in 1669. During the next three decades the Irish labor force in the English West Indies was substantially replaced by blacks imported from Africa, and most of the Irish moved to the new Carolina colonies. There their numbers were augmented by immigrants arriving directly from Ireland. Englishmen and Huguenots went to the Carolinas as well, of course, but in the words of an early South Carolina historian, “no country furnished the province with as many inhabitants as Ireland.” The historian was Robert Mills writing in 1826, and he added, “scarcely a ship sailed from any [Ireland’s] ports, for Charleston, that was not crowded with men, women, and children.” In addition, 25,000 to 30,000 were transported as convicts between the 1720s and the 1760s, mainly to Maryland and Virginia, and perhaps as many more immigrated as indentured servants during that period, again mainly to Maryland and Virginia.
The last and the greatest wave of immigration to the South was that of the Scots-Irish. It is generally recognized that not many Scots emigrated directly from Scotland to America: a few hundred a year went from the Lowlands, mainly to Chesapeake region, and about 20,000 went from the Highlands during the decade before the American Revolution, mainly to the Carolinas. By contrast, the number of punitive “Scots” who migrated from Northern Ireland during the six decades before the revolution has been estimated variously from 130,000 to 500,000. That about a third of these landed in southern ports is well known, as is the fact that all but a handful of the rest landed in Philadelphia, from which they moved inland and thence down the interior uplands from Maryland to Georgia. After the Revolution they continued to follow that migratory pattern, but many also went down the Ohio River to Kentucky and to Southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.
The prevailing understanding—or, rather, misunderstanding—is that the Scots-Irish were descendants of Scots who settled on the Ulster plantations created by James I in 1610 and rarely intermingled with the “mere” pure Irish. There are several things wrong with that view. One is that, as we have seen, Ulster men, Hebrideans and western Highlanders were all but indistinguishable, having for centuries been a part of a single, herding, sea-faring, and warrior culture that as a practical matter had been politically autonomous under the Lordship of the Isles until the end of the 15thcentury. As importantly, the 17thcentury migrations from Scotland to Ireland cannot be squared with the myth that the 18thcentury Scots-Irish were descended from the settlers on the Ulster plantations. As of death the in 1625 of James, about 14,000 new Scots had been settled un Ulster, perhaps half being Lowlanders, the rest being from the Hebrides and western Highlands. The number approximately doubled during the 1630s, but the newcomers apparently came mainly from the area between Aberdeenshire and Inverness, and they went not to the plantation areas but to Counties Antrim and Down, which were not among the six counties. Many of the newly arrived Scots in Ulster fled or were killed during the turbulent 1640s, and by 1652 the total number had declined to about 20,000. Another large migration took place during the next two decades and Sir William Petty estimated that in 1672 there were 100,000 Scots in Northern Ireland. Few Scots went to Ireland during the next generation, but in 1695 a devastating famine swept the Highlands and Islands, and a mass exodus ensued. The Bishop of Baphoe estimated that no fewer than 50,000 Scots families—overwhelmingly western Highlanders and Hebrideans—moved to Northern Ireland during the late 17thand early 18thcentury periods.
In sum, the “Scots-Irish” who emigrated to America during the 18thcentury were not descendants of Lowland settlers in Ulster plantations but members of a traditionally Gaelic (or Norse-Gaelic) society who had been movie back in forth between Ulster and the Highlands and Islands for nearly one thousand years.
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Approaching the subject in a different way, Harry M. Caudill also found that many more Celts settled in the antebellum South than conventional sources acknowledge. Using a modern Welsh telephone directory, and old Welsh church records, Caudill refuted Ellen Churchill Semple’s contention that the settlers of eastern Kentucky were Anglo-Saxons. “The 1984 [Welsh] telephone directory,” he found, “is astonishingly similar to the name listing of that portion of Kentucky which begins about thirty miles east of Lexington and continues to the Big Sandy and the Virginia line. In turning its pages, a Kentuckian develops the distinct feeling that he is not in a foreign country but is back home.” All but six of the one-hundred and twelve counties named for persons in Kentucky have Celtic names. Caudill concluded that rather than the Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains Semple “should have called here article The Celts of the Kentucky Mountains.”
The Irish presence in the South has been overlooked by historians who have assumed incorrectly that during the colonial period of American settlement that all natives of Ireland outside of Ulster were devout Catholics. “The passionate and exemplary attachment of the Irish nation to the Catholic faith dates from a later time,” wrote a distinguished Irish historian about the 17thand 18thcenturies; “the real contest was between Englishmen and Irishmen rather than Protestants and Catholics…In Ireland in the 17thcentury…the Irish laity were still for the most part only passively and traditionally Catholic.” Nor had the situation changed appreciably by the first part of the 19thcentury. “The figures on church attendance in pre-famine Ireland indicate that only thirty-three percent of the Catholic population went to mass,” noted an eminent authority. “Most of the two million Irish who emigrated between 1847 and 1860 were part of the pre-famine generation of non-practicing Catholics, if indeed they were Catholics at all. Not until the later part of the 19thcentury, long after most of the Irish who came to the south had migrated, did the “devotional revolution” turn Ireland into a country of church-goers who equated Irish nationalism with Catholicism.
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Nor were Southerners unaware of their Celtic heritage (a Yankee once told me that Southerners could not be of Celtic descent because they never claimed Celtic ancestry). Some Southerners, brainwashed by Yankee written history and propaganda, may have been ignorant of their heritage, but there have always been those who appreciated their past. Antebellum Virginian John Pendleton Kennedy filled his novels with Southerners with Scots-Irish ancestry; Mary Chestnut remarked in 1861 that “So many [Southerners] are descendants of Irishmen”; and a post-bellum writer insisted that “the Southern people…were nearly entirely of Scots-Irish…Cavalier, and Huguenot blood.” The heroine of Gone with the Wind was of Irish descent, and Andrew Jackson, who despised the English, was as aware of his Celtic ancestry as the man who eulogized him, Jefferson Davis. “Andrew Jackson was descended from an Irish family of obscure history but as far as I can learn distinguished by a love of liberty, a hatred of tyranny, and a defiance of oppression,” said Davis. “His grandfather fought at the siege of Carrickferguis, a victim to the progress of British aggression. His father unable to brook the insolence of the petty tyrant that English confiscation set over the estates of Ireland, sought an asylum in the wilds of America.
Various local studies and articles and state journals also recount the Celtic heritage of many Southerners. Irving S. Cobb, for example, pointed out in 1931 that the south’s heritage was not Anglo-Saxon. “No,” he wrote, “the lost Irish tribes of the South are not lost;…for their Irish blood is of the strain that cannot be extinguished, and it lives today, thank god, in the attributes and the habits and the customs and the traditions of the Southern people.”
-excerpted from Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways of the Old South by Grady McWhiney (1988)