The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764 [Hardcover]

This work is a mass of disjointed ancedotes from historical archives put together without a purpose except to satisfy a dissertation advisor and gain a PhD. In spite of the volumious end notes, there is nothing new or revealing here. Leyburn's book is clearly superior.

I was put on to this book by a criticism of another of the author's books on the Scotch-Irish who described the author as "a dynamic young historian on the cutting edge of early American and Atlantic world scholarship." Wow, was I disappointed!

The title is stupid and trite, as the term "Scotch-Irish" will do just fine for the people described and has been in general use since 1744. So now, all of a sudden, we can't name them?

The author focuses only on the Scotch-Irish in Pennsylvania, and although he clearly knows there were large and prosperous settlements of Scotch-Irish along the frontier from Maine to Georgia, he chooses to ignore them. Moreover, he marginalizes the Scotch-Irish by primarily using sources in the colonies that viewed the Scotch-Irish with disdain and hostility (including Logan, who was Scotch-Irish himself.) Not much fairness or scholarship here.

The numbers of Scotch-Irish immigrants are somewhat controversial although the 100,000 number prior to 1776 is often quoted. Writers such as Fiske have gone as high as 500,000. That is clearly an exaggeration given the numbers of ships sailing from Ulster during this period and their passenger capacity. But other sources give 30,000 as the number following the Antrim evictions, and 44,000 from 1769-1774, and the annual rates of 70-100 sailings from Ulster indicate higher migration numbers. A better estimate might be 140,000, but the author would be well advised to spend some time checking sailings and passenger lists. At any rate, it is generally thought that the Scotch-Irish population in the colonies in 1776 was about 600,000 out of a population of approximately 3,200,000. The Scotch-Irish put a premium on having large families.

Worst of all, he states "... these people did not comprise the political nation, those few who held the reins of political power." Well, the Scotch-Irish came to the colonies without money or power, did not attempt to become "Britons" as the author claims, but in one or two generations became the leading power in the American Revolution and the early US. Four of the first five commanders-in-chief of the US Army were Scotch-Irish, seven of the first thirteen governors, a large number of the signers of the Declaration of Independence including John Hancock, Rutledge, Paine, Whipple, McKean, Nelson, Thornton and Taylor, many of the generals in the Revolutionary War including George Rodgers Clarke, Daniel Morgan, Richard Montgomery, Henry Knox, Anthony Wayne, Andrew Lewis, Walter Stewart, Thomas Robinson, William Thompson, Enoch Poor, John Stark, William Maxwell, John Clark, Andrew Pickens, Ephraim Blaine, Thomas Polk, James Miller, Joseph Reed, James Clinton, John Armstrong, James Ewing, William Henry, Michael Simpson, William Irvine, Francis Preston and William Campbell, to name a few, and we should not forget Simon Kenton, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. And almost half of the first 31 presidents have Scotch-Irish ancestors.

The British knew their enemy: Walpole made the famous comment that "... our American cousin has run away with a Scotch-Irish parson." Plowden stated that "... most of the successes in America were immediately owing to the vigor and courage of the Irish emigrants." One British officer simply described the war as "a Presbyterian Revolt." When the opportunity offered itself to shoot down redcoats, the Scotch-Irish did so with relish.

The author might have looked at the Irish Dougherty clann for its history of converting to Presbyterianism in the middle 17th century, then losing half of the clann back to Catholicism between the English Civil War and the "Glorious Revolution." Those that remained Presbyterian became part of the Scotch-Irish, and swarmed to the rolls of the Pennsylvania Line and other units from every state, but most importantly New Hampshire, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and the "over the mountain" men of East Tennessee. No less than three Doughertys were members of Washington's Lifeguard.

General Charles Lee stated that half of the Continental Army was Irish, and the early regiments of the Pennsylvania Line were almost entirely Scotch-Irish. To a very large degree, the War for Independence was fought and won by the Scotch-Irish, not the least for the injustices, many religious, done to them by the English in lowland Scotland and the Ulster Plantation. Without the fifth or less of the population that was Scotch-Irish during the Revolutionary War, we might still be in the British Commonwealth. Nonetheless, what the English sent around came around, but somehow the author missed all of that. Oh well, maybe later.

If you want a less academic-sounding book on the subject, it is hard to find a better book than that which was penned by James Leyburn back in 1962. On the other hand, comparing Griffin's book to James Webb's romantic depiction of the Scots-Irish, is a terrible mistake. Griffin's book is a tough read, but if you have an interest in identity formation and its relationship to religion, then give it a look. It will not be a waste of time. If you have an interest in Irish Catholics and their imprint on the Irish and American landscapes, you can't beat Kerby Miller's two books. The only serious academic competition No Name has to date on the diffusion of Presbyterianism is found in Marilyn Westerkamp's Triumph of the Laity.

Have you ever read a book that completely changes the way you think about a subject, that resolves nagging inconsistencies with which you've struggled? Patrick Griffin's "The People of No Name" has been such a book for me. By relocating and enlarging the context for studying the group known popularly as the Scots Irish, the Scotch Irish, and, in the American Deep South, as the Irish, Griffin offers a fresh and far more accurate, productive perspective from which to view this people's identity and unique role in both British and American history. This is a brilliant book, one that gives insight into the complex experience of a people under change in a world under change.

The title of his book clearly indicates the group's importance - "The People of No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764." The role of the Ulster Scots in expanding the British world to include Britain's American colonies cannot be denied. In the 60 or 70 years leading up to the American Revolution, more than 100,000 Presbyterians left Ulster in Ireland for Britain's North American colonies. The migration was far and away the largest movement of any group from the British Isles to British North American in the eighteenth century, and its impact on both sides of the Atlantic was profound. The Crown's authorities in Ireland demanded local officials account for an exodus that threatened to undo the work of James I in providing a Protestant balance for the Catholicism in Ireland and to further undermine the sadly flagging Irish economy. Newspapers in New Castle and Philadelphia announced the arrival in a single week of "two thousand Irish and abundance more expected daily." "Multitudes of people are preparing to transport themselves to America," a shocked Philadelphia writer announced.

Most previous histories have regarded the people who made up this extraordinary migration either within the context of the British Isles or within the context of the migrants' experience in North America. Griffin's is the first book to place the group within the context its members actually experienced - a transatlantic British world, one they coincidentally helped to create. For the Ulster Presbyterians left Ireland not for some brave new world radically different from the one in which they had lived. Contrary to much popular lore, most came hoping to find a world where they might share equally in the rights they believed natural to all British citizens, rights that had been seriously abridged in Ireland, where as religious dissenters they had been increasingly marginalized.

The largest group of them came to Pennsylvania not by happenstance, but by deliberate choice. Pennsylvania's commitment to religious toleration afforded the best opportunity for them to participate fully in British society. For years Presbyterian missionaries and early migrants had written home remarking this commitment and the bounteous soils of the region. Moreover, the religious ties with Pennsylvania were reinforced by economic ties. Pennsylvania produced most of the flax and flax seed for the Irish linen market and most of the valued Irish linen was offloaded at New Port. Trade, religion, and early migrants' communications familiarized this part of British North America for Protestant dissenters from northern Ireland.

Just as their experience in Ireland had changed their Scottish forebears, the experience of these new immigrants on the frontiers they would inhabit in America also changed them, coarsening many, softening some of their old religious rigor, strengthening the fierce commitment to liberty their Irish experience had ingrained in them.

Drawing on newspapers, letters, church records, colonial documents, Griffin brings to the page this people who have too often been romanticized abstractions. They come to life on as a group who self-identified themselves as religious dissenters living in a confessional state. We see the incipient struggles within their Presbyterian churches between the need for a steadying orthodoxy and the need for a more vital religious experience, a struggle that in America would open many to the Baptist religion. We see their ministers quoting Locke on the doctrine of Natural Rights in their appeals to the Irish state for religious equality with the state church, arguments that would later bolster a revolution against Britain in America. In a relatively short space (172 pages, not counting the endnotes), we become closely familiar with a people as they move from one part of the British world to another part, leaving dramatic marks in both places.

One of the things that interested me personally was the way in which the Ulster Scots' success in the linen trade affected their churches and created a broader view of the British world. Having traded with colonies in North America, they developed a broader sense of their identity as citizens of a trans-Atlantic British world. Thus, when forces within Ireland and England left them unable to see hope for themselves and their church in Ireland, they more easily saw migration to the American colonies as a reasonable alternative to their hardships. I was particularly amused that the English seemed blithely unaware of their migrations until those were almost at an end. Anyone who has studied England's attitude toward Ireland in the period or who has read much of Jonathan Swift's work will appreciate Griffin's description of the scurry of correspondence demanding an accounting for their departures - after the fact.

I was also surprised to encounter not only John Locke's Natural Rights arguments, but his very words - verbatim - in the mouth of an Ulster Presbyterian minister. Suddenly I understood more about this group's character and influence in America, especially on the character of the American South, a region still largely peopled by descendants of the Ulster Scots.

This is a highly readable book, written in sharp, lively prose and filled with the kind of detail that gives a sense of place and time. For the footnotes alone, I recommend it to anyone interested in the Ulster Scots or British and American history in the 18th century. Yet for the many who are descended from Ulster Scots and who are interested in exploring the group's impact on American culture and politics, I can imagine no better accurate source of information. Pay no attention to the reviewer who described it as a "tough read." "Terrific read" - maybe that's what he meant. That, certainly, is what I found it to be. And I am not a professional historian.

For a follow-up, I recommend Peter N. Moore"s "World of Toil and Strife: Community Transformation in Backcountry South Carolina, 1750-1805." In it Moore traces some of the forces that occupied Griffin's study as they manifest themselves in the Waxhaws community. Good companion books.

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