I'm Eastcote. I live in Bingham Farms, Michigan, in the United States. I'm an American, and my people have been American for 300 years or so. I have an affinity for nature, liberty, good cheese and good beer. I drive Jeeps, Land Rovers, and Fords. I've been a few places in the world, from Japan and the Philippines, to Uzbekistan, Haiti, the old Soviet Union, and a few other places. I've trapped crocodiles in South Africa, and fished in the Tennessee River. At some point or another I went to college.
A NOTE TO THOSE WHO WISH TO FIGHT ABOUT IRISH ISSUES
Keep it to yourself. I don't care about modern Irish Catholic/Protestant relations, and I don't have a dog in that fight. I'm interested in the Scotch-Irish, who stopped being Irish and became Americans over two hundred years ago. "Scotch-Irish" identity has nothing to do with Orange Orders, lambeg drums, and Ian Paisley. Think log cabins, coonhounds, bluegrass, and Cumberland Gap instead, please. My roots disappear in the dim distant past in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee. I've got no feud with you, so please don't pick one with me.
The strength of emotion involved in this Irish issue got me to thinking, so I thought I'd write this little dissertation, because I think there's a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation involved.
One big distinction I see between the descendents of the "Scotch-Irish" and the "Irish" in America lies in the emphasis placed on Ireland and Irishness itself. Herein, I think, is where the misunderstanding and seemingly one-sided conflict lies. Many Scotch-Irish, myself included, are genuinely puzzled at the angry response the term "Scotch-Irish" causes, and the lengths to which people go to argue the term away.
I'm generalizing here, but with Irish descendents, much of their identity derives from their cultural memory of Ireland, "the Old Sod", the Catholic/Protestant conflict that existed (and still exists) there, the famine and hardship that caused so many to make the trip to America, and the trials they encountered when they settled in the large northeastern cities of the United States.
The Scotch-Irish identity, to the contrary, has nothing to do with Ireland at all. The Scotch-Irish identity lies wholly within America, as there is no cultural memory left of Ireland. It's just a dry fact of history that we came from Ireland way back before the Revolution. On our arrival, there were no large cities to move into. We moved into a wilderness, hacked farms out of the forest, and began the push across the Appalachians and westward. As observed by author James Leyburn, by 1800 the Scotch-Irish had ceased to be Irish at all, and had become the American archetype, the frontiersman with gun, axe, and Bible in hand. The "Old Sod" -- the ancestral homeland that we romanticize -- is Clinch Mountain, or Sand Mountain, or Jones's Cove or Linville Falls -- not Ireland.
It's a safe bet that the majority of Scotch-Irish descendents today have no inkling that their people came from Ireland, other than a surname that might be Irish, or Scottish, or English. There are no stories of ocean voyages, no tales of an Ellis Island, and no memory of Catholic/Protestant conflict. Our cultural memories are of Kings Mountain, of moonshiners and feuds, of coal mines and textile mills, of poverty and shirts made of flour sacks, of salt pork, okrey and cornbread, and of the Hillbilly Highway north to a land of promise. In my own family, the only origin anyone knew of was that we came from up in Virginia sometime before 1800. Before that was anyone's guess. We'd been in the mountains since time began, far as anyone knew. It's only in the last 5 or so years that I've learned for sure we came here from Ulster.
Although the majority of the Scotch-Irish were plain farmers, there were some educated folks who resurrected the old 18th century term "Scotch-Irish", and promoted it as an identifier in the late 1800s. But neither the "Scotch" nor the "Irish" parts of the name carry any real emotional meaning to the people it is attached to. It might not even be the best name to use, but it is the name accepted in scholarly research for the past century and a half, and has begun to see more use among the people it describes, thanks to a few recent popular books on the subject. Maybe author Patrick Griffin has the best name for us: "The People with No Name".
But Scotch-Irish will work. It's a lot more polite than Hillbilly.
So please, if we meet on the street sometime and I hear you're Irish...when I stick out my hand and say, "My people came from Ireland, too -- we're Scotch-Irish"...don't let that dark cloud cross your face...there's no hostility on my part.