" The mountaineers of Tennessee and
Kentucky are largely the descendants of these same Ulster Scots, and
their origin is conclusively shown by the phrase used by mothers to
their unruly children: "If you don't behave, Clavers [i.e.,
Claverhouse] will get you."
If we must continue to use the hyphen when referring to these early
immigrants it is preferable to use the term "Ulster Scot" instead of
"Scotch-Irish," as was pointed out by the late Whitelaw Reid, because
it does not confuse the race with the accident of birth, and because
the people preferred it themselves. "If these Scottish and
Presbyterian colonists," he says, "must be called Irish because they
had been one or two generations in the north of Ireland, then the
Pilgrim Fathers, who had been one generation or more in Holland, must
by the same reasoning be called Dutch or at the very least English
Dutch."
To understand the reasons for the Scots colonization of Ulster and the
replantation in America it is necessary to look back three centuries
in British history. On the crushing of the Irish rebellion under Sir
Cahir O'Dogherty in 1607 about 500,000 acres of forfeited land in the
province of Ulster were at the disposal of the crown. At the
suggestion of King James the I. of England, Ulster was divided into
lots and offered to colonists from England. Circumstances, however,
turned what was mainly intended to be an English enterprise into a
Scottish one. Scottish participation "which does not seem to have been
originally regarded as important," became eventually, as Ford points
out, the mainstay of the enterprise.
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