The People with No Name: Ulster's Migrants and Identity Formation in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania

Patrick Griffin

PENNSYLVANIA'S Scots-Irish defy simple explanation. Indeed, even the term "Scots-Irish" causes concern. The men and women who sailed from Ulster to Pennsylvania and peopled the frontier during the eighteenth century did not use the label, nor did their neighbors. Historians created the name to reflect the hybrid origins of an American group that left Ireland but descended from Scots. Although contemporaries used "Scotch-Irish" to describe the group, settlers from Ulster despised "such ill natured titles." 1 The term did not gain general currency until the late nineteenth century, when real and imagined descendants of settlers from Ulster embraced it to distinguish a Protestant people from Catholic Irish immigrants streaming into the country. For the eighteenth century, therefore, the men and women who left Ulster for Pennsylvania were a people without a name. 2	1
To complicate matters, these migrants have unsettling implications for the reigning model of identity formation for eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. By most accounts, each of the various groups that peopled the colony overcame the regional and religious differences of its place of origin to develop a sense of ethnic consensus in the New World based on Old World traditions. To define the identity of groups has involved tracing the evolution of a bundle of traits, ideas, or practices carried over from Europe and resurrected in America, usually in confrontation with the Other. Once embraced, the new identity imbued settlers with a sense of unity, coherence, or equilibrium, allowing each group to create meaningful cultural space in a plural landscape. 3	2
But did these men and women who sailed from Ulster become Scottish or Irish? By one account, the group defined itself by Irish traditions in America and in so doing put an indelible stamp on colonial American religious practices. Soon after arriving, migrants recreated institutions that had sustained the group in Ireland, particularly adherence to the Westminster Confession of Faith—the classic statement of British Calvinist orthodoxy—and championed a vital piety similar to what had flourished in Ireland a century earlier. 4 Other interpretations argue that these people carried no distinctive characteristics to the colonies but fashioned themselves as Scots in the New World. The revival spirit and the confession arose from Scottish, not Irish, ecclesiastical traditions. Although most on the frontier who supported Scottish church practices migrated from Ireland, their Irish background is assumed to have little or no significance. 5	. . .