Off with the green and on with the orange.

If we are to truly believe in our faith and culture as well as the respect our country then we must be true to our selves our history and from where we and our history came.

According to the magazine Now and Then, statistics are given that show one out of four Americans can claim Scottish/Scotch Irish descent. The periodical also states that a quarter of a million Scotch Irish (Ulster Scots) migrated to America helping to establish the backbone of much of US society. Statistically speaking that is enough to substantiate an examination of the influence of the Scotch Irish culture on America.

In a random choice of just 7 states, Census 2000 counted 3,031,600 in just 7 states.

California - 952,200

Florida - 540,873

Texas - 627,457

Michigan - 224,803

New York - 212,275

North Carolina - 255,825

Pennsylvania - 218,173

This is a clear indication of the growing number who now realize that the are indeed of Scotch Irish dissent and not Irish, and it surly puts a massive hole in the much talked about figure of 38.7 million who supposedly once claimed Irish ancestry.

As one researcher put it "I grew up thinking I was Irish American, with a real emphasis on the Irish. In recent years, I have come to learn that Hamilton's are a lowland SCOTS clan. They moved to Ulster and then the US, I really haven't had anything to do with the Irish, I am Scotch Irish or Ulster Scots who are a completely different people altogether"

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the first American census of 1790 and has concluded that roughly one-fifth of the white population of the Southern states, over a quarter-million Southerners, were of Scotch Irish birth or descent. The proportions ranged from 17%-18% in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina to as high as one-third in Kentucky and Tennessee, while in Georgia and South Carolina.

So how come so many said Irish when asked ?

Scotch-Irish peasants

in Ulster

By 1860, of course, the overwhelming majority of the Scotch Irish-born settlers in the eighteenth-and even the very early nineteenth-century South had died. And, since the 1860 Census did not record parental birthplaces, the ancestral origins of their living descendants also went untallied. However, exactly two hundred years after the first American Census, that of 1990 recorded some rather curious statistics.

In 1990 some 38.7 million Americans responded to a question concerning their ethnicity by listing "Irish" as their response. One remarkable result was that 34% of these self-described "Irish-Americans" (about 12.3 million of them) resided in the South--although in 1860 a mere 11% of Irish immigrants had lived in the Southern states. Put another way, in 1990 one-fifth of white Southerners identified their ancestry as Irish, although in 1860 only 2% of white Southerners had been Irish-born, strange or what?

Curiously, if one combines the self-described "Irish" and "Scotch-Irish" in the Southern states in 1990, they comprise about 24% of the entire Southern white population--which is almost precisely the all-"Irish" proportion of the South’s population in 1790, plus an allowance for the small Catholic Irish immigration of the mid-nineteenth century!

One must conclude that in 1990 a surprisingly large number of descendants of the early Scotch Irish Protestant settlers of those who had emigrated prior to the American Revolution or, at the latest, prior to 1830 were unwittingly identifying themselves with the birthplace of ancestors who had left Ireland as opposed.

From the 1830s on, celebrants of what Michael O’Brien called the "Scotch-Irish Myth" drew sharp and often invidious comparisons between their Irish Protestant ancestors and the Irish Catholic immigrants of the Famine and post-Famine decades.

Ignoring Ulster Presbyterian immigrants whose economic distress or political activities did not exemplify group prosperity and patriotism, they projected the frailties of their own unfortunates and misfits onto Irish Catholic immigrants, implying that the Scotch-Irish could not have been failures because, by definition, the virtues inherent in their religion and British origins guaranteed their moral, cultural, and, hence, their economic and political superiority.

Certainly, as James Leyburn has written, "Scotch-Irish" is "a useful term... express[ing] a historical reality," and, if employed carefully and neutrally, can reflect valid distinctions between Ulster Presbyterian immigrants of seventeenth-century Scottish origins and the Irish. The label was reborn in the early nineteenth century, in the evangelical favor of the Second Great Awakening, among middle-class Americans of Ulster Presbyterian descent who were appalled by the possibility that they or their ancestors might be identified with the increasing numbers of Catholic immigrants.

By the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, the term had developed to include all Americans of Irish descent who were not currently Catholic, as the authors of county histories in states as far afield as South Carolina and South Dakota busily designated as "Scotch-Irish" the ancestors of respectable Methodist and Baptist farmers and businessmen named O’Brien, O’Sullivan, and O’Callaghan! In the eighteenth- and very early nineteenth centuries, however, designations such as "Irish Protestants," "north Irish," or, most frequently and most vaguely inclusive of all, simply "Irish," were much more common than "Scotch-Irish."

To conclude, I would like to return to the variety and mutability of early Scotch Irish and Irish identities by talking about a man who came from Ireland to South Carolina and Georgia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, William Hill.

He was a merchant and farmer, who lived in Abbeville District, South Carolina, from 1822 until his death, aged eighty, in 1886. Hill was born in 1805 in Ballynure parish, Co. Antrim, into a Presbyterian family that had been implicated in the 1798 Rebellion. Now did it matter to William if he was Irish or Scotch Irish? Yes it most defiantly did, just as it does for many today and it should matter to you if it doesn't already.

In Ballynure parish, 85% of the inhabitants had been Presbyterians, only 5% Catholics. As a result, William was shocked and embarrassed by what he described as the "want and wretchedness" of the Irish who came to South Carolina at mid-century and who, in his words, "reflect discredit on their countrymen." Being a very fair man, this was strange for him but for the first time he was obliged to distinguish between his own people and what he called "the real Irish, of papist stock." William's fear of guilt by association was not imaginary, for in the mid-1850s a Native-American Party, pledged to halt the Irish influx and curtail immigrants also.

Many Irish would love to distort history for many reasons, but it cant be right. What happened, the way it happened and who made it happen matters. Of the 38.7 million Americans in the census I think we can safely say that over 60% are genuinely Scotch Irish.

It was surprising that the 1990 Census, had many of the present descendants of the William Hills--and of the hundreds of thousands of other Ulster Protestants who settled in the USA-- regarding themselves as inclusively "Irish" even more surprising today is that in Census 2000 that trend had stopped and many are now truly going back to their roots, Scotch Irish roots that is.