Review

The often mislabeled "Scotch-Irish" were one of the first the ethnic groups to arrive in America. Descended from Gaelic short-distance boat people, they helped to rule Cromwellian Ireland, and in time became American Civil War soldiers and forebears of those disavowed creatures, the "rednecks." Long unfashionable as subjects for historical discussion—the "Ulster Scots" are now trendy. The reason is to be found in the changing preoccupations of historians. Historical studies of the English-speaking world once concentrated upon the development of "English liberties." Recently, historians began to look at the multicultural "British problem," and still more recently, to look at this in the context of the scholarship of identities in an "Atlantic World."	1
Patrick Griffin enters the milieu of ethnicity with an unassuming style that reminds the reader that what is on offer here is not the dense empiricism of the English don, but spare prose designed for educated Americans. Griffin's story is set between the British Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution. Chapter one considers the expectations that the Glorious Revolution created for Ulster Presbyterians. They thought that their loyalty to Crown and Protestantism would entitle them to the relatively tolerant treatment accorded to Scots Presbyterians in Scotland. In discussing their disappointment in this Griffin does not neglect the negative economic conditions that resulted from a period of warfare and provided a convincing argument for emigration. Linen transformed the economy of Northern Ireland as markets flourished; but tenants still suffered from disadvantages. Greater prosperity piled business cycles upon harvest cycles and increased the risks and rewards for the Ulster community.	2
Griffith also discusses the religious causes of the migration from Ulster. The early eighteenth century witnessed a confessional split between "Old Lights" and "New Lights" in the Ulster Presbyterian constellation and his second chapter considers how that division promoted a kind of unity among Ulster Presbyterians combating second-class status within the British confessional state. Their failed attempts to gain repeal of the Test Act that excluded them from political rights, however, confirmed them in their "second-class status" in a "second-rate kingdom" (p. 64). In chapter three Griffith concludes, however, that it was not economic deprivation but prosperity that led many Ulster Scots to migrate, particularly because most who left paid their own way (p. 79). Ulster Scots who remained faced religious dislocation, including problems with funding Presbyterian churches in Ulster under the hegemonic rule of the Anglican Ascendancy. Ulster Scots envisioned and experienced America, by contrast, as a land where all of their problems from Ireland could be turned inside out (p. 97). In America they hoped to dwell, as they had not in Ireland, in religious freedom, moderate prosperity, and, above all, in unity.	3
Once Ulster Scots had arrived in America, however, they found themselves exposed to a series of other ethnic identities, as Griffin vividly portrays in chapter four. Old World adhesions, such as the Irish church, provided a source of direction in a frontier society that was a clash of cultures and interests. During an initial period of ethnic isolation, presbytery offered a means of retaining the comforts, if not of home, at least of affinity with the land they had left behind. Responses to the changing frontier centered on religious expression, primarily the experience of the "Great Awakening," which provided not unity in a difficult frontier setting but the experience of division and tension, as Griffin outlines in chapter five. By the 1750's and 60's, however, it was not internal division but competing Baptists and social change that troubled the Ulster Presbyterian project in America. In a concluding chapter, Griffin notes that three legacies, "movement, Reformed Protestantism, and Britishness" informed the impact of Ulster Scots/American Scots-Irish on the Atlantic world (p. 172).	4
Certain things are missing from Griffin's account. Griffin barely touches upon legal hegemony in the "Atlantic world." He treats religious expression, meanwhile, neither as intramural polemic nor as a matter for materialist reduction. The result is an approach of bland descriptiveness. The way in which Griffin approaches ethno-religious consciousness reveals the difficulty of escaping defining metaphors, in this case the notion that a sense of identity created a "world" of activity. In that "world," historical personages and groups were, according to momentary or syntactical demands, "immersed." Or they might"encounter" their world. Or they might be "animated,"stretched," or "shaped" by it, and so on. However much ethnic identities may contain elements of human experience, the notion of a"world" or "worlds," accordingly, comes dangerously close to reification. Despite the impressive research arrayed here, the explanation that results is, like the Westminster Confession, partly dependent upon verbal formularies ritually repeated. Nevertheless, Griffin's book transcends the relevance of the typical monograph. Its factual basis will provide enriching reading and teaching for those who wish to chart the ridge of ethnic identity at its peak.	5
William Carey College Myron C. Noonkester

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