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Facts about the Ulster Scots - Part
Five
The two men who founded the great city of Nashville - John
Donelson and James Robertson - were also of County Antrim stock; those
sturdy founding fathers of Knoxville - James White, John Adair and
George McNutt. There were illustrious churchmen like Revs Samuel Doak,
Joseph Rhea, John Craig, William Marlin, William Tennent and Samuel
Black, and the first map maker of Tennessee in the early 19th century,
Matthew Rhea.
And there was Arthur Dobbs, who was instrumental in
populating large Ulster-Scots settlements in North Carolina in the
1740s-1750s.
Many Civil War soldiers of distinction were of
Ulster-Scots origin: Thomas John Jonathan 'Stonewall' Jackson, J.E.B.
Stuart, Ulysses Grant, George Brinton McClellan and Philip Sheridan. In
the Carolinas, North and South, it is estimated that 40 per cent of
Confederate soldiers were of Scots-Irish lineage. North Carolina
suffered the highest casualties of the War - Company 'B' of Jackson's
Guards from the Waxhaws, a Scots-Irish stronghold, had the biggest loss
of any Confederate unit, 80 killed or wounded at Gettysburg.
Others of Scots-Irish roots were Samuel Lanthom Clemens
(author Mark Twain), Cyrus McCormick, the man who revolutionised
farming; songwriter Stephen Foster, and James Stewart, the Holywood
movie star. The wealthy Hearst publishing family can trace their history
back to John Hearst, a County Monaghan Presbyterian who sailed from
Newry in County Down in 1764 for a fare of four shillings and eight
pence.
The Scots-Irish who headed west 200-250 years ago belonged
to the same breed of people who today constitute the majority Protestant
and Unionist community in Northern Ireland. Virtually all of these
emigrants led the vanguard against the British in the War of
Independence in the 1770/1780s.
In Northern Ireland today, the Scots-Irish (the
Protestant-Unionist population) pledge themselves to the maintenance of
the link with Britain. The complexities of the Several hundred years of
British history since fully explain this paradoxical situation in terms
of economic benefit and cultural attachments for the one million people
who presently hold this view.
In the United States today an estimated 44 million people
claim Irish extraction. But while the Irish American community, the
descendants of the Roman Catholic emigrants who moved at the time of the
potato famine in the mid-19th century are the most vocal and politically
active on Ireland. 56 per cent of Americans with Irish roots are of
Protestant stock, whose forebears were the Scots-Irish Presbyterians who
settled on the frontier in the 18th century. |