Many unscrupulous people found this government-sponsored mayhem convenient. Armed gangs called reivers would descend on farms and carry off crops and cattle. Some families were even said to be Scottish when they will, and English at their pleasure–a dual allegiance that let them profit from the victories of both sides. The region never enjoyed 50 consecutive years of peace. When James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne in 1603, things quieted down, but under his son Charles I hostilities broke out again, and continued in Oliver Cromwell’s era and beyond. Major border skirmishes occurred in 1680, 1689, 1715 and 1745. Clearly, the chances of farming in peace were minimal.

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They were little better just across the Irish Sea. Historically, the nine counties of northern Ireland, known as Ulster, were home to both the Picts and Scots, as were the southern counties of lowland Scotland, which lie only 12 miles across the North Channel of the Irish Sea. The people of the two regions therefore shared a common heritage. Scottish lowlanders seeking grazing land settled in Ulster, a practice fostered by the competing Irish warlords, who often preferred Scottish settlers on their land rather than rival Irishmen. After the Reformation, most Scots were Protestants, so the English, also mostly Protestant, encouraged ever more of them to settle in Ireland, hoping that this would help bring the country firmly under English control. To attract them, landowners granted longer leases than those offered in Scotland, thus encouraging them to improve the land. Many found they could do well growing flax and making linen.

In contrast, Catholic Irishmen often found themselves landless in their own country. Naturally, they resented this, and as the 16th and 17th centuries fueled religious enmity throughout Europe, they grew ever more outraged at both the Calvinist Scots and the Anglican English. When the forces of King William of Orange decisively defeated the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, the peace that followed was bitter; indeed, it was almost as hard to find peace in Ulster as it was on the English-Scottish border.Economically, things were bad too. By the early 18th century, the long leases that had attracted the Scots were expiring, and absentee landlords took the chance to increase rents sharply and to write shorter leases. At each expiry, the rent increased dramatically in a practice known as rack-renting. Many Scots-Irish Presbyterians could not pay because groups of Irish Catholics with lower economic expectations would band together to outbid them to rent one farm among them all. Then 1714 brought a series of poor harvests leading to six years of famine. Epidemics among farm animals and a smallpox outbreak blighted 1718. With such disasters coming to a region riven by conflict, it is no surprise that the Scots-Irish of Ireland and Scotland, and the English of the northern counties, began leaving for America.

A few had arrived in the 17th century, but in 1718 a total of 10 boats with 1,000 people left Ulster for Boston. They spread to Maine, where the towns of Bangor and Belfast attest to their arrival, and westward to Massachusetts and New Hampshire. By the 1720s, vessels were bringing northern immigrants to Philadelphia, whence they were encouraged to move westward into the hills of the interior. Waves of immigration continued, reaching especially intense levels in 1729, 1741, 1755 and particularly in the decade from 1765 to 1775. The newcomers spread south from western Pennsylvania through the backcountry of Maryland and along the mountains of Virginia and the Carolinas and then into Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky.

By 1790 more than half the population of that vast area came from Scotland, Ireland and northern England. One hundred and fifty thousand came from Northern Ireland, with at least another 100,000 coming from the Scottish lowlands and northern England. The place names of the region show their progress. Cumberland, the extreme northwestern county of England, appears in the Cumberland River of Tennessee, the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky, the Cumberland Gap through the Appalachians, and the many Cumberland counties of the southern United States. Durham, the great cathedral city of England’s northeast, is another popular name, as is Galloway, one of Scotland’s southern counties. Places called New Scotland and Caledonia abound, while the Irish town of Derry, called Londonderry by the English and the Protestants, appears in America under both its names. Orange was a favorite Protestant name because it was the family name of King William, the victor of the Boyne. It is commemorated in the town of Orange in western Massachusetts, where some early immigrants settled, as well as Orange County in North Carolina and Orangeburg in South Carolina.

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