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This is a series of quotations from the book that I found noteworthy (for my own random reasons); it does not in any way constitute a precis of the argument, nor does it outline the complete picture he draws.
Introduction
p. xiii - xii - George Pierson remarks that the colonizing process brought America a “decapitated society.” He means that this country received as immigrants “no royalty, no aristocracy, no leisure class.” [GW Pierson, “The Moving American,” Yale Review, XLIV (autumn, 1954), 108]
. . . . People who migrate are usually either dissatisfied at home or ambitious to improve their lot; but upper classes are already successful, and so have no reason to go to a wilderness to start afresh.
Plain as these facts are, people still look for distinguished ancestors (emphasis mine). It seems not to be enough that one’s family tree shows decent, ambitious, God-fearing people; they must be wellborn. The search for aristocrats among the early Scotch-Irish will prove futile (emphasis mine). These people were doubly a “decapitated society,” for they had migrated twice. The move from Scotland to Ireland had been made by the optimistic poor; the move to America once more left behind most of those who had risen to prominence.
p. xiv - xv - The Scots who went across the Channel to northern Ireland to participate in the “Plantation of Ulster” from 1610 onwards ran the gamut of character. . . . [They] were humble folk with ambition and with qualities of character that made them good pioneers. Even Presbyterian ministers who worked among them were usually of the humbler walks of Scottish life, for the Scottish Kirk offered no sinecures for younger sons of the gentry.
p. xv - The Scotland from which the exodus began in 1610 was one of the poorest and most backward of European countries. Poverty-stricken, generally lawless, still lingering in the Middle Ages in the seventeenth century (and even into the eighteenth), with agricultural methods hardly better than primitive, there was every reason why an ambitious Scot should look elsewhere for improvement of his condition. [Note: Even to have been a Scottish lord in 1600 would not, by present standards, have been cause for boasting. Many of the lords were unprincipled, lawless, and arrogant; few had wealth in anything but land; most of them were illiterate.]
p. xv - xvi - Another misconception must be cleared away. . . . Kilts, sporrans, and their accouterments derive almost entirely from the Highlands of Scotland, not from the Lowlands, whence came the Scots who went over to Ireland. . . .
Part I: The Scot in 1600
Chapter 2 - Domestic Life of the Lowland Scot
p. 16 - 17 - Those Scots who migrated to Ulster early in the seventeenth century were almost without exception tenants of one sort or another [he has just described various forms of tenancy - kindly tenants, joint tenants, sub-tenants]. They owed to their lairds specific rents, paid in kind and various services. . . .
For all the recognized social distinctions among the five classes on a feudal estate [besides the three forms of tenants, there were noblemen and lairds (free-holders)], daily life led to a great deal of social intercourse, carried on without haughtiness on the one hand or servility on the other.
p. 17-19 - The squalor and meanness of country life around 1600 can hardly be conceived by a person of the twentieth century. [Note: what is said here is as valid of 1700 as for 1600, for it was only in the eighteenth century that rural conditions began to improve in Scotland.] . . . A home was likely to be little more than a shanty, constructed of stones, banked with turf, without mortar, and with straw, heather, or moss stuffed in the holes to keep out the blasts. The roof was of thatch or of turf. There were no chimneys, but only holes in the roof for the smoke to escape. The fire, usually in the middle of the house floor, often filled the whole hut with malodorous clouds, since the smoke-clotted roof gradually stopped the vent-hole. Cattle were tethered at night at one end of the room, while the family lay at the other on heather piled upon the floor. Light came from an opening at either gable; when the wind blew and winter came, these holes were stuffed with brackens or old rags to keep out the sleet and blast. Floors were of the earth itself, and mud from the farm-yard was tracked into the house to compound the filthiness. Since sanitary arrangements were wholly lacking and since animals slept in the same fetid room, vermin abounded. The people professed to like their small filthy hovels because of their warmth.
Since the land was almost wholly treeless, wood was valuable. It was common practice for an outgoing tenant to remove from the farmhouse all the beams and timbers which he himself had put in; and consequently his successor came not to a home, but to a ruin consisting of four broken walls. . . .
Illness was frequent and epidemics recurrent. . . .
p. 20 - 23 - Agricultural methods were of an unbelievable primitiveness. [He describes the system of land-holding, with land leased in small, separate bits - and leased in such short terms that there was pointless for the farmer to make improvements.] . . . The grain sown was the poorest and least prolific kind, which had been long since abandoned in most countries of Europe. . . . There were no enclosures, no dykes or hedges. . . . The farming instruments were as primitive as those of ancient Mesopotamia. Plows were, as they continued to be late in the eighteenth century, huge, clumsy affairs constructed almost wholly of wood. . . . For all its size, it made only a shallow rut in the ground rather than a furrow, leaving the soil for the most part equally fast on both sides of it. . . . Because they worked in rocky soil, it normally required eight, and sometimes as many as twelve, oxen to draw the plows. The oxen were almost sure to be mismatched, so that their management required brute strength on the part of the men. Plowing could never be accomplished by a single person; on the contrary, a whole band participated. The strongest man held the plow, and must be able to bear the shock of collision with “sit-fast” stones; another led the team, walking backwards in order to stop the oxen from funning into boulders; a third went in front with a triangular spade to “mend the land” and fill up the hollows; usually another, known as the “gad-man,” was armed with a long pole sharply pointed, with which he goaded the lagging beasts. . . . With all this entourage, a plow scratched the surface of only half an acre a day.
Harrows were still more primitive. Some of them were nothing more than a bundle of thorns . . . . Until the Privy Council condemned the practice, the wooden harrows in some districts were dragged by the tails of the horses. . .
.
p. 27 - Life was not wholly drab. [There were peddlers and fairs.]
p. 29 - There is no indication that the nature of the people was depressed; on the contrary, they seem to have lived a robustly cheerful life. Local singers with their ballads were in the tradition of the Celt, and many communities had their harpists and pipe-players. The people were rich in folk tales. Dances drew neighbors together. Yule (Christmas), Pasch (Easter), and the various saints’ days were observed with gaiety until the Reformation sternly repressed their celebration. May-games and other holiday amusements were enjoyed.
p. 30 - Marriage among country-folk occurred at an early age. As soon as the boy was able to do a man’s work and had proved his ability to bear arms, he was considered old enough to marry; and the girl might marry shortly after she became nubile. Even after the Reformation the age of marriage was often as early as fourteen for boys and twelve for girls. . . .
One of the tasks the newly established Kirk set itself after 1561 was the reform of morals. It may be contended that the reform was too thoroughgoing and that it went beyond the bounds of morality to make the Scots dour and puritanical; yet there is ample evidence that the moral sense of the people had been feeble . . . .
p. 30 - Superstition was widespread, with a common belief in magic, sorcery, witchcraft, and necromancy, in ghosts, spirits, and demons.
p. 32 - The status of women was, quite simply, that of many primitive agricultural tribes. Women did most of the duties connected with the house and worked in the fields, not only alongside the men, but especially when men were away at war. . . . They had few legal rights. Marriage was a practical necessity. Chivalry was absent, politeness was regarded as an affection, and abductions . . . were frequent. [Note: Women were no cleaner in their habits than men nor better in this matter in the upper classes than in the lower. As late as 1650 it was stated that “many of the women are so sluttish, that they do not wash their linen above once a month, nor their hands and faces above once a year.” (Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs [London, 1792], p. 468) . . . .]
p. 33-4 - The farmer’s relation to his overlord preserved his individuality; his raiding and fighting made him feel that his own strength and shrewdness mattered. When men take the law into their own hands they necessarily cultivate initiate and accept change. Humility is a characteristic of some peasants, but not of the Scot; the nearest approach to humility in Scotland was a man’s loyalty to his lord or laird who had proved his quality as a man and had shown himself worthy of the loyalty.
Chapter 4 - Religion in Scotland
p. 56 - Whereas in England the Reform had been chiefly the work of the sovereign and the court party, in Scotland it immediately won the people to its ideals. It is this fact that underlies the claim of some that Scotland emerged within the span of a single generation from barbarism to civilization.
With only about six hundred ministers to lead it, the Kirk started its work. During the next century it accomplished many things: it won first the awe, then the admiration, and finally the intense affection of the people; it instilled into the Scot a devotion to education; it set about the reform of morals, and succeeded so well in this effort that Scotland became puritanical; more than any other force in Scottish history, it welded into a nation (at least in the Lowlands) a bickering people; it introduced a measure of democracy in church government. But (emphasis mine) it also persecuted witches, carried the censorship of morals to the point of tyranny, preached intolerance, and (some say) made the cheerful Scot dour in temperament.
Chapter 5 - Mind and Character of the Lowlander
p. 65-6 - Lowlanders who left Scotland for Ireland between 1610 and 1690 were biologically compounded of many ancestral strains. While the Gaelic Highlanders of that time were (as they are probably still) overwhelmingly Celtic in ancestry, this was not true of the Lowlanders.
[There were at least nine strains in the makeup of the Lowlander: three pre-Roman - the aborigines, the Gaels (Celtic) and the Britons (also Celtic); then the Romans, Teutonic Angles and Saxons, the Scots (Celts from Northern Ireland), and the Norse; then some few Normans and some Flemish traders. And besides these, there was the occasional English.]
Then he talks about “national character,” recognizing that individuals are individuals, but that societies do develop certain characteristics and do encourage certain traits and discourage others.
p. 67-70 - The most obvious characteristic [of the Lowland, not the Highland] must be given its Scottish name, “dourness.” . . . [which] literally means hardness and durability . . . . The Scot knew famine and plague, thin soil, insecurity of life and property, raids, and aggression. He early learned to fight back, to give blow for blow, and then, when he had done his best, to endure. From the beginning of their history no one had ever called the Scots a submissive people. . . . Dourness also has overtones of stubbornness - and even Scots are likely to admit thas as a characteristic of the people.
This hardness combined with it a tendency toward violence which sometimes was not far removed from cruelty. . . .
When a country lacks any kind of police and the rule of law, it is to be expected that the people, if they have any sense of pride (and the Scot had an abundance), will attempt to settle their own disputes and defend their own rights, by violence if necessary. In so doing, the Scot revealed another of his mental attitudes: that a man’s “rights” are worth defending. This is to say that the Scot was quick to take offense, lest any man consider him a weakling. No peasant mentality persuaded him to bow his head to what he felt to be an infringement of his liberty; on the contrary, his lord’s example and his own experience taught him that if he did not fight for his own rights he would lose them. . . .
Among his values, then, was freedom as Scottish tradition interpreted the word. He would not tolerate subservience. . . .
There was nothing automatic about the loyalty a Scot gave to his chief.
[More characteristics - all interesting to read about.]
p. 72 - The fact is that before the Reformation, and even in the next century after the number of schools had increased, the Scots had not been an intellectual people. . . .
[He says that it was the Reformation which made the Scots hungry for education - and suggests that it was partially because it gave their minds something to think about.]
p. 74 - Zeal for education, however, must not be confused with a desire for liberal learning. . . .
Scotland had its Reformation in the sixteenth century, but reversing the order of things in most European countries, it did not achieve its Renaissance until the eighteenth. The Scot had proved the acuity of his mind, but he had not yet accepted in all respects European standards about the content of an educated mind.
p. 78 - [Scotland was - except for religion - not party to the new ideas swirling around Europe in the seventeenth century.] [In America] he was to become a mainstay of the American Revolution; but at home he had never been a participant in any revolution - neither a Peasants’ Revolt nor a Glorious Revolution nor any other. He fought to keep what he liked and to have the right to decide for himself.
Part II : The Scots in Ireland
Chapter 6 - The Plantation of Ulster
p. 93 - Of the six counties of the Plantation, Donegal and Tyrone were given almost wholly to Scots; Armagh and Derry were prevailingly English; Fermanagh and Cavan showed both Scottish and English influence.
p. 94 - King James had been explicit, by his limitation of the grants to Scots from “the inward parts of Scotland” (that is, the Lowlands), to exclude all Highlanders from the Plantation. The records show clearly the parts of the Lowlands from which most of the early settlers in Ulster derived. Galloway, that region of the southwest which included the shires of Ayr, Dumfries, Renfrew, Dumbarton, and Lanark, provided the greatest number, for the obvious reason that it was closest to Ulster. The counties around Edinburgh (the Lothians and Berwick) came next in order, while a much smaller contingent come from the district lying between Aberdeen and Inverness in the northeast.
p. 95 - The Plantation of Ulster succeeded. . . .
The condition of the land itself varied, and this had an effect on both the economic success of the newcomers and their state of mind. . . . In many parts . . . the land was a desert. Between Donaghdee (county Down) and Newtown (in Armagh) “thirty cabins could not be found, nor any stone walls, but ruined roofless churches, and a few vaults at Grey Abbey, and a stump of an old castle at Newtown.” [The quotation comes from the Montgomery Manuscripts, ed. George Hill (Belfast, 1869), p. 68]
Ulster became the meeting-ground, after 1610, of three peoplw of widely different culture and backgrounds - Scottish Lowlanders, English farmers and Londoners, and Irish natives.
p. 97 - A hoary institution of Scotland quietly disappeared from the scene in the colonization of Ulster: feudalism was not transplanted to northern Ireland. . . . No attention was called to the end of an era, but from now own Ulstermen, like their Scotch-Irish descendants, would feel a new freedom to strike their own bargains, a man deciding his future for himself. The passage to Ulster was a stride toward individualism.
Chapter 7 - Causes of the Scottish Migration
The major causes were, not surprisingly, economic and religious. During the first 50 years, economic hardship was the spur; after that came the “killing times” when the Covenanters of the Western Lowlands fought against Charles II.
p. 105 - While this religious turmoil was raging bitterly in Scotland, there was comparative freedom of worship in nearby Ulster. It is small wonder that a new wave of migration to that haven of peace began, on which swelled mightily after the Covenanters, attempting a pitched battle, were decisively defeated at Bothwell Bridge (1679). He does not, by the way, think highly of the Covenanters - says they did not represent the majority and that “thousands regarded them as narrow-minded, unruly bigots, who were not being ‘persecuted’ but were rightly being punished for causing a disturbance.’”
p. 107 - The Bloodless Revolution of 1689, which brought William of Orange to the throne, promised the Scots freedom in religious matters, and the promise was kept. . . . In 1707 the Act of Union brought Scotland and England together in the United Kingdom, with the result of an immediate and vast improvement in the economic condition of the Lowlands. The two main causes for migration to Ulster were thereby, in less than two decades, removed. The push and pull of the Scots toward Ireland practically ceased when the Stuarts no longer sat on the throne.
Chapter 9 - The Hard Years, 1634-1690
1633 - Thomas Wentworth -> Lord Deputy of Ireland; William Laud -> Archbishop of Canterbury.
p.121-2 Beginning in Ulster, in 1639 he compelled all Ulster Scots over sixteen years of age to swear that they would obey the King’s royal commands and to declare their disapproval of the recent Scottish rebellion against the King’s episcopal ordinances. All who refused to take this “Black Oath,” as it was called, were to be punished severely. The Oath resulted in a considerable exodus of Scots whose conscience would not allow them to subscribe to it: they went back to the mother country, where the “rebellion” of the Covenant of 1636 had successfully established Presbyterian practice.
Archbishop Laud had one sole purpose: to see to it that High-Church procedures prevailed in all of the King’s dominions which precipitated the rebellion of the covenanters. . . Now in Ulster he replaced al Puritan bishops with his own men, requiring them to use their influence to make the Presbyterian ministers conform . . . . Some of these ministers were deposed and excommunicated . . . . For five years after 1636 most Scottish congregations in Ulster were without their ministers. [Note - One group of Ulster Scots, led by four deposed ministers, determined to migrate to America; but a fainthearted captain and a succession of terrible storms at sea forced the ship to turn back to Ireland. This might have become the first Scotch-Irish migration to America.]
Ultimately Wentworth was recalled and religious liberty was reestablished (and many exiles returned from Scotland). Then came the (native Irish) rising of 1641.
p 124 - Fighting lasted for eleven years. . . . It is probable that about a seventh of the total population of the colonists in Ulster had died.
The Ulster Scots were in an odd position - against the Irish, yes, but also eventually against the Parliament party. Cromwell took care of both Irish and Scots when he came over, and many Scots were scheduled for transportation - but he changed his mind.
p.127 - During the years from 1660 to the end of the century the British element I n Ulster rapidly increased. Foremost in number were the Scots who came over to escape the “killing times” of the Covenanting troubles. . . . The English element also increased, by the coming in of the Dissenters. Many Americans who consider their ancestors to have been Scotch-Irish are actually descendants of English settlers, especially from the counties between London and Wales.
p. 131 - During the last decade of the seventeenth century Ulster received one final wave of immigration from Scotland, of men attracted by the offer of farms that had been laid waste during the trouble under James II. [and estimated 50,000 people]
Chapter 10 - Intermarriage with the Irish
Arguments for and against - but he thinks really not much intermarriage occurred.
Chapter 11 - The Character of the Ulster Scot
Three major differences between Scots and Ulstermen
1. Social distinctions changed - Feudalism disappeared -
free labor, free movement -> possibility of changing social status
-> rise of ambition
people = free agents
2. Shift in loyalty to place
they became a new nationality - they were IRISH -
(When they went on to America, they called themselves Irish - only upset when they were confused with Catholic Irish. Their descendants, however, sometimes left out Ireland and called themselves Scots.)
3. Quality of Presbyterianism
almost uniformly puritan and conservative
(bigotry)
church discipline and surveillance over private lives
-Calvinism strongly opposed to absolutism in govt - but NOT in favor of freedom of conscience or rights of individual - however, once opposition to authority was started . . .
Women - not mentioned therefore assume no change in status
Church had some democratic ways, but not as much as you might think
Devoted to education (but not liberal)
No appreciation of beauty
uncouth manners - almost complete indifference to cleanliness