Notes to How Scotch-Irish is your English
Revision of an essay originally published in Journal of East Tennessee History, vol. 67, 1-33 (1995).
By Prof. Michael Montgomery
« Scotch-Irish Emigrant Letters
Notes
1 The author is grateful to many friends and colleagues in Northern Ireland who helped him explore connections between their part of the world and his native East Tennessee. He especially benefitted from conversations with Philip S. Robinson, formerly of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum in Holywood, County Down. This paper grew out of the author's address at the 1992 annual banquet of the Sullivan County (TN) Historical Society in Bristol, Tennessee. He thanks Earline O'Dell of Northeastern State Community College for that invitation and for the opportunity to reflect on experiences and weave them into essay form. However, the views expressed in this paper are the author's alone, and any errors of fact or interpretation are solely his responsibility.
2 Carrickfergus Borough Council, "Andrew Jackson Centre at Boneybefore," n.d.
3 Although "Ulster" and "Northern Ireland" are used interchangeably by some today in a political sense, the nine-county historical province of Ulster is a larger entity encompassing three counties (Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan) that did not become part of the six-county province of Northern Ireland (which comprises the counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone) when the latter became part of the United Kingdom in 1922. In this paper, "Ulster" refers to the historical nine-county province.
4 W. F. Marshall, Ulster Sails West: The Story of the Great Emigration from Ulster to America in the Eighteenth Century, Together with an Outline of the Part Played by Ulster Men in Building the United States (Belfast, 1943); Eric Montgomery, The Scotch-Irish and Ulster: The Scotch-Irish in America's History (Belfast: Ulster-Scot Historical Society, 1965); Ronnie Hanna, The Highest Call: Ulster and the American Presidency (Lurgan: Ulster Society, 1989); Billy Kennedy, The Scots-Irish in the Hills of Tennessee (Belfast: Ambassador, 1995).
5 David Hume, "Garden of the Waxhaw," New Ulster (Winter 1993), 13-14.
6 Rory Fitzpatrick, God's Frontiersmen: The Scots-Irish Epic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989).
7 Billy Kennedy, "Magic in the Place of the Blue Smoke," Belfast News-Letter (July 2, 1993), 25.
8 Among the most important works dealing with the subject are R. W. Dickson, Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718-1775 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966; reprinted, Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1987); David Noel Doyle, Irish, Irishmen and Revolutionary America 1760-1820 (Dublin: Mercier, 1981); James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962); Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Kerby Miller and Paul Wagner, Out of Ireland: The Story of Irish Emigration to America (Boulder, Col.: Roberts Rinehart, 1997). Streams of emigration, not always voluntary ones, have ebbed and flowed from Ireland to North America for more than three hundred years. Miller, the foremost authority on the subject, estimates that at least seven million people have made the voyage (Miller, p.c.) Historians generally distinguish two larger emigrations—one in the 18th century, mostly of Protestants from Ulster, and a much larger outpouring of mainly Catholic Irish in the 19th and early twentieth century, primarily from southern and western Ireland. As the work of Miller and other scholars shows, the two differed in multiple ways, including their areas of settlement (most 19th-century Irish came to Northern cities).
9 For the fullest examination of the historical usage and precedence of the two terms, see Michael Montgomery, "Nomenclature for Ulster Emigrants: Scotch-Irish or Scots-Irish?" Familia 20 (2004), 16-36.
10 James G. Craighead, Scotch and Irish Seeds in American Soil: The Early History of the Scotch and Irish Churches, and Their Relations to the Presbyterian Church of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1878).
11 Charles A. Hanna, The Scotch-Irish, or the Scot in North Britain, North Ireland, and North America, 2 volumes (New York: Putnam, 1902; reprinted, Baltimore: Genealogical, 2004).
12 Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, (New York, 1904), vol. 1, 134.
13 James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), and Thomas A. Lewis, West from Shenandoah; a Scotch-Irish Family Fights for America 1729-1781 (New York: Wiley and Sons, 2004). Webb emphasizes in particular the reputation of America's forebears from Scotland and Ulster as warriors and defenders of personal freedom and opponents to aristocracy. He credits them with fundamental views on which the United States has developed. Lewis chronicles the early settlement of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, which the author calls "the first frontier," and the role of the author's ancestors in this process.
14 Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Marianne Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginning of Mass Migration to North America (College Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). For other sources, see note 8.
15 David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Fischer uses the collective label "Borderers" to encompass the peoples of Northern England, Scotland, and Ireland and argues not only that there was internal migration between these areas, but that they brought to North America a shared and distinctive culture.
16 For 17th-century emigration from Lowland Scotland to Ulster, see Maxwell Perceval-Maxwell, The Scottish Migration to Ulster in the Reign of James I (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973; reprinted, Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1990); Philip S. Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster: British Settlement in an Irish Landscape 1600-1670 (Dublin: Gill and McMillan, 1984; reprinted, Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1994); Patrick Fitzgerald, 'Black '97': Reconsidering Scottish Migration to Ireland in the Seventeenth Century and the Scotch-Irish in America' in William P. Kelly, and John R. Young, (eds.), Ireland and Scotland 1600-2000: History, Language and Identity; W. A. Macafee, "The Movement of British Settlers into Ulster in the Seventeenth Century," Familia 2 (1992), 94-111.
17 Robert J. Gregg, "The Scotch-Irish Dialect Boundaries in Ulster," Patterns in the Folk Speech of the British Isles, ed. by Martyn Wakelin (London: Athlone, 1972), 109-39, provides the definitive mapping of the Ulster-Scots speech areas. Robinson, op. cit., builds on Gregg's work by mapping surnames and the locations of Presbyterian churches.
18 Montgomery. op. cit.
19 Maldwyn A. Jones, "The Scotch-Irish in British America," Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. by Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 284-313. Jones' essay is by far the best recent review of the literature on the Scotch-Irish.
20 This was the consensus (at its meeting in Staunton, Virginia, in September 2003) of the U.S. Scholarship Panel commissioned by the Ulster American Folk Park to advise it on developing a new outdoor exhibit. This team comprised eight American academics (including several prominent historians of emigration). It agreed that the number may have been much higher, but that 150,000 was a minimum figure for those coming from Ulster between 1718 and 1776 and one-half million for those coming between 1680 and 1830.
21 Percentages of migration are calculated by Trevor Parkhill, "Brave New World: 18th Century Emigration to America," Auld Lang Syne: Searching for That Elusive Scots/Irish Ancestor (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1992), 13-14.
22 Eric Montgomery, op. cit., 4.
23 Wilma Dykeman, Tennessee: A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1976), 14-15.
24 An excellent and sober exploration of the question of tracing traditional surnames in Southern Appalachia is John C. Campbell's chapter "Ancestry" in his The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1921; reprinted, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1969), 50-71. More recent research using genealogical records on 18th-century Tennesseans has shown that emigrants from Ulster were by far the largest proportion of them. See Michael Montgomery and Cherel Henderson, "Counting Early Ulster Emigrants to Tennessee," Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies 2.1 (2004), 34-44.
25 American Council of Learned Societies, Surnames in the Census of 1790: An Analysis of National Origins of the Population (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1932; reprinted, Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1969).
26 Ibid.
27 James Paul Allen and Eugene Turner, We the People: An Atlas of America's Ethnic Diversity (New York: Macmillan, 1988). A recalculation by Doyle, op. cit., 75, assigns to states generally double the proportion of overall Irish-derived population than the 1932 ACLS report does.
28 Michael B. Montgomery and Joseph S. Hall, eds., Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004). For the fullest assessment of the Elizabethan English idea, see Michael Montgomery, "In the Mountains They Speak like Shakespeare," Myths in Linguistics, ed. by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (New York: Penguin, 1998), 66-76.
29 Though Southern Appalachia has a modern-day reputation of being and having been an isolated region, in the 19th century it was both a crossroads and a seed bed for much migration to the Southwest, Lower Midwest, and West. As a result, relatively few linguistic features are confined only to Southern Appalachia today, much less to East Tennessee, but many are found there in greater concentrations than elsewhere. A paper by this writer, "The Diversity of Appalachian English" (given at the 1992 Appalachian Studies Association in Asheville, NC), examined the items indicated by the first two volumes of the Dictionary of American Regional English (covering letters A-H) to be today more or less confined to Southern Appalachia. Two-thirds of these could not be linked to any European source, indicating that Appalachian English is far more innovative than commonly described.
30 A typical statement is the following, written by Charles Morrow Wilson: "We know a land of Elizabethan ways—a country of Spenserian speech, Shakespearean people, and of cavaliers and curtsies. It is a land of high hopes and mystic allegiances, where one may stroll through forests of Arden and find heaths and habits of olden England. We are speaking of the Southern highland—Appalachia"; see Wilson, "Elizabethan America," Atlantic (1929), 238-44. See also Montgomery, op. cit. (1998). Two papers by this writer discuss more fully the assessment of the Scotch-Irish linguistic elements in Appalachia. These are Michael Montgomery, "The Roots of Appalachian English: Scotch-Irish or Southern British?," Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association, ed. by John Inscoe (Johnson City, 1991), 177-91; and Michael Montgomery, "The Scotch-Irish Influence on Appalachian English: How Broad? How Deep?" Ulster and North America: Trans-Atlantic Perspectives on the Scotch-Irish, ed. by H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood, Jr. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 189-212.
31 Montgomery and Hall, op. cit.; Lee Pederson, East Tennessee Folk Speech: A Synopsis (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1983); Michael E. Ellis, The Relationship of Appalachian English with British Regional Dialects (Johnson City, Tenn.: 1984); and Donna Christian, Walt Wolfram, and Nanjo Dube, Variation and Change in Geographically Isolated Communities: Appalachian English and Ozark English (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1988).
32 For studies of Ulster emigrant letters, see E. R. R. Green, "Ulster Emigrants' Letters," Essays in Scotch-Irish History, ed. by E. R. R. Green (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 87-103; Michael Montgomery, "The Linguistic Value of Ulster Emigrant Letters," Ulster Folklife 41 (1995), 26-41; Michael Montgomery, "Making the Trans-Atlantic Link between Varieties of English: the Case of Plural Verbal -s," Journal of English Linguistics 25 (1997), 122-41; Michael Montgomery, "On the Trail of Ulster Emigrant Letters," Atlantic Crossroads: Historical Connections between Scotland, Ulster and North America, ed. by Steve Ickringill and Patrick Fitzgerald (Newtownards: Colourpoint, 2001), 13-26; Michael Montgomery, "Emigrants from Ulster Meet the Observer's Paradox: A Typology of Emigrant Letter Writers," Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies 1.4 (2003), 10-18.
33 This letter is reprinted with the permission of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. For a recent reinterpretation of the early evidence for this vowel merger, see Michael Montgomery and Connie Eble, "Historical Perspectives on the pen/pin Merger in Southern American English," Studies in the History of the English Language II: Conversations between Past and Present, ed. by Anne Curzan and Kim Emmons (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004), 429-49.
34 The quotations are from a variety of sources-primarily recordings of speech made by Joseph Sargent Hall in the Smoky Mountains in the 1930s and 1940s, but also some from Wilma Dykeman's The Tall Woman and elsewhere. All quotations and terms discussed in this essay are found in Montgomery and Hall, op. cit.
35 Mitford M. Mathews, ed., Dictionary of Americanisms (Chicago, 1951), 426.
36 Mathews, 386.
37 See Michael Montgomery, From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, forthcoming).
38 C. Hodge Mathes, Tall Tales from Old Smoky (Kingsport: Southern, 1952).