Wasps and crackers.

Miller, David W.

H. TYLER BLETHEN and CURTIS W. WOOD, JR.

Editors

Ulster and North America, Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scotch-Irish

University of Alabama Press, 2001, $24.95

THE REISSUE IN PAPERBACK OF THIS 1997 collection of papers presented to the Ulster-American Heritage Symposium reflects a growing scholarly interest in what Patrick Griffin has recently called "the people with no name." A confusing feature of the history of the Scotch-Irish. as an ethnic community in North America is that when they were such a community they did not generally call themselves "Scotch-Irish." Although earlier usages of the term can be found, it was only in the latter half of the nineteenth century that descendants and successors of those Protestant immigrants who had earlier called themselves simply "Irish" began to prefer a label which would distinguish them from their more-recently-arrived Catholic counterparts. However, by that time these "Scotch-Irish" were well on their way to new identities. In the industrialized North they were assimilating to the dominant white Protestant ethos (what we would later call "WASP" culture--never mind the tenuousness of their links to the Angles and the Saxo ns). By contrast their country cousins in rural areas of Ulster Protestant settlement, especially in the South, were becoming part of a different grouping--the "crackers." Neither waspness nor cracker-hood, however, was purely an ethnic attribute; each carried a social class vector which pointed up for wasps and down for crackers.

So students of the Ulster-Scot diaspora as an ethnic group (which, by the way, is only part of a larger Scottish diaspora) face especially tricky issues in trying to discern the continuities and account for the discontinuities in their subjects' transatlantic odysseys. For example, the clearest marker of Ulster-Scot ethnicity in the old country during the eighteenth-century emigrations was Presbyterianism, but when we pursue the history of American Presbyterianism as a possible carrier of Ulster-Scot identity we immediately confront complexities. In both Ulster and America, Presbyterianism ain't what it used to be. As Sean Connolly points out in an excellent essay on their history from 1660 to 1850, the Ulster Presbyterians at the end of this period were ceasing to be a "separate people" and becoming a "religious denomination" (40). Or, as I prefer to put it, the Presbyterian Church in nineteenth-century Ulster transformed itself from a communal church serving the whole community of Scottish descent to a clas s church serving primarily, a middle-class constituency. In America a similar process occurred. In "Scotch-Irish Frontier Society in Southwestern North Carolina, 1780-1840," H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood, Jr. find that after about 1810 the Baptist and Methodist churches were siphoning off all but a few of the Ulster-Scot families from Presbyterianism (220). Indeed, the capacity of the Presbyterian Church to sustain wasp identities on the part of its twentieth-century suburban adherents owes much to such defections throughout much of crackerdom in the nineteenth (though I suspect that rural western Pennsylvania was a partial exception).

Another example of the complexity of assessing the Scotch-Irish cultural presence is the problem of dialect patterns. We have all heard that somehow if you go far enough up the holler in some part or another of Appalachia you will hear pure Ulster-Scots speech (or maybe it's Elizabethan English, or whatever). To make sense of such claims requires careful linguistic research, which is just what Michael Montgomery provides (189-212) in a pioneering analysis which concludes that indeed there are components of Ulster-Scot speech (along with features from other parts of the British Isles) preserved in Appalachian English. What we really need is an analysis of the religious component of Scotch-Irish identity as critical and nuanced as Montgomery's analysis of its linguistic component.

A subtext of the entire collection is the futility of the search for some cultural essence of Scotch-Irishness which somehow manifested itself in the American experience of its carriers; the work of Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald comes in for particular criticism. Rather, the historian should eschew such macro-stereotypes, and engage the micro-experience of Ulster-Scot migrants in both the sending and receiving communities. Perhaps the most provocative example of such analysis is Catherine Anne Wilson's study of nineteenth-century migrants from St. Andrews parish on the Ards peninsula in County Down to Amherst Island, Ontario. Here we see tenant right and remarkably patriarchal landlord-tenant relations in a North American setting, and a focus on family and communal ties which might lead a young man to sail back to the Ards to find a bride.

The history of (Catholic) Irish-Americans flourished, starting a generation or so ago, in case studies within the then-new American urban history. The experience of post-famine immigrants was captured in numerous monographs on the Irish in particular cities. Trevor Parkhill's able contribution on Ulster emigrant letters from Philadelphia falls within that tradition. For the most part, however, the mainly pre-famine experience of Scotch-Irish immigrants is being addressed within the context of the subsequent "new" rural history. A major concern of that literature is to specify the process from primarily subsistence to primarily market-driven economic behavior in the countryside, and to assess the implications of that process for our understanding of community, family and individualistic values. Vivienne Pollock points the way to a transatlantic inquiry along such lines. Specific case studies are offered by Russel Gerlach on the Scotch-Irish in the Ozarks and Warren Hofstra on the Opequon settlement in Virginia , as well as the contributions of Blethen and Wood and of Wilson, already noted.

A review of the pre-famine Irish demographic literature with special attention to Ulster by William Macafee and a study of the dynamics of emigration from 1680 to 1720 by Graeme Kirkham provide useful context. Finally, Edward J. Cowan's "Prophecy and Prophylaxis: A Paradigm for the Scotch-Irish?" challenges us to come to terms with the rich tradition of Scottish popular prophecy which seems at variance with the allegedly hard-headed rationalism of Presbyterianism. Indeed the entire work signals an important new direction in the history of the Atlantic World.

--Carnegie Mellon University